Adam Acar and Yuya Muraki from the Kobe City University of Foreign Studies Research recently completed a study of potential benefits social media websites, such as Twitter, can bring to people involved in disasters, reports EurekAlert. Twitter users were surveyed and questioned and updates from people in the disaster-struck area were tracked from the social media site two weeks after the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11, reports EurekAlert
The study will be available in the "Twitter for Crisis Communication: Lessons Learnt from Japan's Tsunami Disaster" in International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2011 published by Interscience Publishers.