Does Your Clinical Laboratory Twitter? The CDC Does!
Social networking services gain acceptance by healthcare organizations
Late last April, during the A/H1N1 influenza outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) began using a social networking service called Twitter as a way to provide instant updates on H1N1 cases and developments. By the middle of May, more than 130,000 Twitter users were signed up to receive these updates!
If social networking is not on your clinical laboratory’s radar screen yet, it will soon be. The CDC’s use of Twitter as a valuable resource to instantly communicate news about the H1N1 influenza outbreak demonstrates how people, companies, and government agencies are rapidly finding useful ways to use social networking Web services.
Twitter is a simple concept. Wikipedia defines Twitter as a “free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters, displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers).” In the pathology profession, pathologist Bruce Friedman, M.D.—known for his blog Lab Soft News has been “tweeting” for over a year. @LabSoftNews & @Dark_Daily
Probably the best known social networking Web sites in the United States are Facebook and MySpace. For business, LinkedIn has become popular. Nexopia is big in Canada. In Europe, such sites as Bebo, Hi5, and Skyrock have high traffic. For South America, it is social networking Web sites such as Orkut and Hi5.
