The Latest in IT Security

Tech giants Google and Twitter have had difficulties seeing eye-to-eye since the end of their partnership in 2011, but it appears Google is putting old grievances aside for a greater good. As of Tuesday, Google Public Alerts has begun incorporating tweets from disaster-struck locations. Extracted from Twitters public API, these notifications are used to supplement updates from organizations like the National Weather Service. The idea is to have the publics tweets help answer questions like Are schools closing?, Are neighbors evacuating?, and What are people seeing on the front lines of a storm? Google Public Alerts disseminates the emergency messages through services such as Google Maps and Google Now, as well as the Public Alerts website. According to Wired, Google stressed that for now, Twitter is only being utilized in conjunction with public alerts and crisis responses. Relations between the two companies have been strained in recent years, with Twitter once describing the search behemoths decision to integrate Google+ into search results as bad for people. Prior to the fallout, Google indexed tweets and made them searchable via access to Twitters Firehose, a real-time data stream exclusive to its partners.