Today's ETech Hack is Tomorrow's Critical Infrastructure...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | Comment | 4 March 2008

My friend Jordan Schwartz just gave me the perfect example of how quickly a cool hack can turn into Critical Infrastructure. Jordan wrote "How to build an SMS Service" and created SwaggleSMS as a demonstration of how to do group chat with SMS. It's a hack that he created as an experiment (it's super-useful for conference afterparty coordination).

Jordan and I were talking about some of the interesting ways that Twitter is being used by mainstream emergency management (see: FactoryJoe, Radar post). Jordan then showed me a message he discovered while checking logs after an upgrade:

"Tom1132 to OurTownFD: Possible drowning in bay"

If it's not obvious... this is fire department who has apparently been using the service for a while. It's a perfect example of how quickly a hack can become critical infrastructure without the creator knowing, let alone being prepared for it. The picture to the right is the "Swaggleplex"... fully operational.

Mikel Maron and I are presenting at ETech on Disaster Tech: What's Working, What's next and we'll be diving into this and other examples of just how quickly the world is changing.

Today's ETech Hack is Tomorrow's Critical Infrastructure...

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