hello delight

Like lots of other people, I went to Twitter to keep tabs on what was going on in Haiti last night.  It wasn't long before I came across Carel Pedre, a local radio host reporting (tweeting) from the ground.

Carel was pumping out lots of photos and general information.  What was interesting about his approach was his dependency on web 2.0 tools.  

While similar, Haiti is different from Iran in the way social media is being used during the crisis.  It seems to be less about re-communication and more about survival.  The web 2.0 infrastructure is nearing our fixed infrastructure in terms of expectations in crisis.  Carel, and many others in Haiti, have had no phone service due to cell outages and have relied purely on Skype.

I haven't heard of any Skype problems, a la the Twitter problems during the Iranian protests, but it's interesting to see how market leaders in emerging platforms become a go-to part of the communication ecosystem in a crisis.  I can only imagine that Skype ever planned to be a worldwide global crisis communication channel, but that's exactly what their customers expect them to be.

It's an interesting twist to the dogma that is currently sweeping the innovation landscape of "good is good enough" and "fail fast" and "launch early".  In the event of market adoption success, these principles can drive human consequences.  It will be interesting to watch for positioning and product changes as entrepreneurs begin to consider their benign web services as tools of survival.