Social media has become an integrated part of human communication, both as a means to establish and maintain social relationships, and as a means of sharing and co-creating information. Social media comes with an array of possibilities for individuals as well as organizations, corporations, and authorities. Within the field of crisis communication, social media possibilities such as online sharing and social networking have had an impact on the way crisis information is disseminated and updated. This paper addresses the issues related to using social media for communicating crisis information and broadcasting alert messages to the general population, discusses the role of social media in future pan-European crisis alerting, and presents a prototype system demonstrating the possibilities. An extensive systematic literature review was carried out to identify factors that affect the use of social media for alerting and warning. These factors were mirrored in experiences, collected through interviews, obtained by emergency management organizations in three European countries (Sweden, Czech Republic, and Spain). The factors finally form the basis for suggestions and recommendations regarding the design of technological tools for both communication and information collection to serve as an integral part of a future pan-European crisis alerting system.

No abstract

Purpose -Mobile computing enables end-users to create small services on their mobiles and share valuable and context-aware information with others. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a platform for end-user generated mobile services -so-called microservices. Design/methodology/approach -As a key component the authors present a microservice description language for user-driven mobile service creation and platform-independent service execution and rendering. The paper also gives insight into the authors' visual authoring tool. The chosen design approach is evaluated in two phases: an intermediate evaluation with a small hands-on trial and an online survey; and a final laboratory test with 24 test users in total. Findings -The paper provides empirical insights about the methods and motivations of end-users creating small mobile services. The main purposes of service creation would be mostly to exchange information, stay in contact, and just for fun (on the basis of non-commercial use). The evaluations also indicate the visual drag and drop approach of putting service blocks together as being the most favored in terms of user satisfaction. Originality/value -The concepts and findings introduced in this paper will help in designing mobile service authoring environments, which is appealing to software communities/vendors and mobile network operators. The presented platform is, to the authors' knowledge, the first designed and implemented infrastructure enabling end-user mobile service creation.

No abstract

Despite the availability of various mobile features and the ability to stay always connected, there are very few applications that truly take advantage of the mobile platform. Frequently, mobile applications are just reduced versions of or thin interfaces to existing personal computer (PC)‐based applications, and therefore do not support specific mobile features. Moreover, Web‐based applications are seldom rendered appropriately on mobile devices. Finally, mobile applications are designed for the exclusive use of the mobile owner, interacting with the network using a client/server approach. This paper presents the concept of distributed mobile applications, focusing on the use of mobile capabilities that allow users to generate content and to access that content using a mobile‐to‐mobile interaction approach. It provides a blueprint for a new multi provider/multi consumer decentralized platform which will provide users with access to content that may have been previously unavailable via dedicated applications. © 2011 Alcatel‐Lucent.