A real-time social media aggregation tool: Reflections from five large-scale events

Social media is gaining interest among emergency response professionals and researchers as a source of real-time information about ongoing events. In this paper we summarize conclusions drawn while using a software prototype that collects, clusters and visualizes status updates from the social microblogging service Twitter in relation to five large-scale events during the spring of 2011. We identify different uses for gathered information and discuss metrics for prioritization of information with regard to these uses.