Which place in the world is safe?

Global/World Quality of Life City Rankings Survey 2008 : Dublin Ireland, Zurich, New York, London, Sydney, Paris etc ; Finfacts Ireland

European cities dominate the worldwide rankings of locations with the best quality of living, according to Mercer’s 2008 Quality of Living Survey. Zurich retains its 2007 title as the highest ranked city, followed jointly by Vienna (2), Geneva (2), then Vancouver (4) and Auckland (5). Dublin has a worldwide rank of 25 and 8th place among European cities.

One of the other web2.0 site that is quite addictive is www.twitter.com.  It is a microblogging service that was founded by Evan Williams, who was the founder before of Blogger.com before it was bought by Google.

Twitter is called a  microblog because you can only send a message that is 140 letters or less, ( a little bit less than texting).  It is something like yahoogroups and texting rolled into one.  What you do is that you register through the website, and then you can update your account either through texting, instant messaging, or through the websites, or one of its numerous 3^rd party client tools.  Then you can go around looking at other people’s sites, and if you like it, you can choose to ‘follow’ them.  Following means that if they update the site, you will be able to read about their updates on your website, or you can even choose to have the updates sent to you through instant message or text your cellphone.

This is almost akin to some of the new features that you can see in almost all social networks – whether in Facebook, LinkedIn, or Friendster, which is ‘what are you doing now?’, and in which if you write something there, then everybody that is checking your account will instantly know.

So, currently, I am following the updates of about 200 people, including some quite famous people that are also there, and it can give you a better idea of what they do.  Some of the famous people in twitter includes Robert Scoble, John Dvorak,  Guy Kawasaki (famous author), Kevin Rose (founder of Digg),  Jason Calacanis ( former head of Netscape’s web and Weblogs Inc), Leo Laporte, Dave Winer ( one of the pioneers and developers of Blogs), Jimbo Wales ( creator of WikiPedia), Joi Ito, and many others.  Barrack Obama also has an account, though it is doubtful whether he is personally updating it.

One of the great uses that I was able to use Twitter was when my kids were in China for summer.  So we set them up on Twitter, and when they instant messaged what they were doing or happening, it automatically updated me, my wife, and some other relatives. So with one message, everybody was synchronized, in real time.

Twitter is a nice way to get in touch fast, and occasionally it is also a good way to get rumors, or even updated on the news.  When the Sichuan earthquake happened, the first instance of my knowing it ( as well as many other people) was through Twitter.

Last Monday night, when it was hardly in the news, I got a twit that said Ces Drilon has been abducted.  Tuesday, before anything came out in the news, and even before some people blog about it, I was already able to read from Twitter what was the latest in Apple’s iPhone offering.  This morning, as I was answering my mail, somebody immediately informed who won the latest Lakers-Celtics game.  So if you are following the right people, it can be a fast way to be in touch.