A couple of nights ago I had just closed my book, turned off my light, and was drifting off to sleep when my cellphone started to shriek. I shot awake and groped for the phone. My sleep-befuddled brain was greeted with this message: "Boulevard, CA Amber Alert update." Then there was a license plate number, and a make and model of the car.
Groggily, I Google this town — Boulevard, Calif. — and discovered it was 541 miles away from my house. That's more than the distance between Washington, D.C., and Detroit. I was mystified. Why was I getting this?
And I wasn't the only Californian who was confused.
Jamie de Guerre is at Topsy, a firm that analyzes Twitter traffic and content for businesses. "We saw a very, very high spike in the number of people tweeting the phrase 'Amber Alert' and responding to having seen this on their phone," he says.
Before the alarm, that phrase was receiving a handful of mentions on Twitter, but in the hours immediately after the alert went out across California, it was mentioned in more than 160,000 tweets.
"The sentiment of the overall tweets was definitely negative," de Guerre says.
More than 21,000 tweets used the phrase "Amber Alert" and the word "scared." "OMFG" came up more than once, the word "annoying" more than 1,700 times.
"The last thing that wireless providers want to do is annoy their subscribers," says Brian Josef, who handles government affairs for CTIA, the wireless industry's lobbying association in Washington. "What we don't want to see is a car alarm syndrome where people disregard the alerts, or worse, they opt out."
Alerts Spark A Frenzy On Twitter
That Amber Alert tone you received on your cell phone might have scared some of you but we need all eyes out for this http://t.co/w9hfIq7Y2p
— CHP Southern Div. (@CHPsouthern) August 6, 2013