Using GroupMe.com For Emergency Preparedness
Before Hurricane Irene hit New York I mocked my wife’s apocalyptic vision of the coming storm.
Standing in Stop and Shop at 10pm piling gallons of bottled water into a cart, I laughed, picturing a Mad Max like landscape where bottled water was currency in her post-storm world.
Fast forward a week later, and a tropical storm destroyed the train line (Port Jervis) that takes us from upstate NY to Manhattan everyday.
Most people’s first instinct in disaster situations is to check on their friends and family. As we all know, phone lines clog up quickly in disaster situations, as evidenced by the recent earthquake tremor in NY that made Californians snicker at our overreactions from afar.
Rather than feverishly dialing your inner circle, I urge you to take a look at GroupMe.
GroupMe is a group messaging app for Android & Iphone that allows you to organize your contacts into groups and establish message boards for those groups which allow for in-app chat as well as SMS (that’s tech messaging for you beautiful people).
Now with your friends and family in a single group, I can send one message out like “Is everyone ok?”
Each group members response comes through on the app or via text message. Group members utilizing the app can opt to share their physical location with you on a map within the app which is helpful for tracking loved ones during an emergency.
Best of all, click one button and GroupMe will dial everyone on the list and invite them to a conference call for free (you still use mobile minutes).
Sure there are no guarantees any of these services will operate successfully during the next emergency, but with the proliferation of smart phones isn’t it worth having this app on standby just in case?
Having recently been acquired by Skype, it will be interesting to see what types of features GroupMe will have in the future.
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Using GroupMe.com For Emergency Preparedness
Before Hurricane Irene hit New York I mocked my wife’s apocalyptic vision of the coming storm.
Standing in Stop and Shop at 10pm piling gallons of bottled water into a cart, I laughed, picturing a Mad Max like landscape where bottled water was currency in her post-storm world.
Fast forward a week later, and a tropical storm destroyed the train line (Port Jervis) that takes us from upstate NY to Manhattan everyday.
Most people’s first instinct in disaster situations is to check on their friends and family. As we all know, phone lines clog up quickly in disaster situations, as evidenced by the recent earthquake tremor in NY that made Californians snicker at our overreactions from afar.
Rather than feverishly dialing your inner circle, I urge you to take a look at GroupMe.
GroupMe is a group messaging app for Android & Iphone that allows you to organize your contacts into groups and establish message boards for those groups which allow for in-app chat as well as SMS (that’s tech messaging for you beautiful people).
Now with your friends and family in a single group, I can send one message out like “Is everyone ok?”
Each group members response comes through on the app or via text message. Group members utilizing the app can opt to share their physical location with you on a map within the app which is helpful for tracking loved ones during an emergency.
Best of all, click one button and GroupMe will dial everyone on the list and invite them to a conference call for free (you still use mobile minutes).
Sure there are no guarantees any of these services will operate successfully during the next emergency, but with the proliferation of smart phones isn’t it worth having this app on standby just in case?
Having recently been acquired by Skype, it will be interesting to see what types of features GroupMe will have in the future.