Disaster Friendly arcitecture

All of the following is entirely inspired by an article on the Radar O'Reilly website.

If in brief, last week M $ began a closed beta test of the new Vine service, intended for monitoring and alerting in the event of catastrophic and abnormal situations. It is planned that this will be a multiplatform (in the understanding of M $) service that allows you to stay in touch with a certain group of people in the event of an emergency or for everyday life.
The service is a mashup from LiveMesenger, FaceBook, LinkedIn and allows you to make group alerts and track the location of participants (through a special client).
Integration with Twitter, the web interface and clients for “Not Windows” are also planned :-).
Let's see, in principle, a quite decent communication platform can turn out, but I suspect that in the case of really serious problems, there will be exactly 0 from it.
In the case of any man-made disasters, the information infrastructure suffers most: if the communication channels are not damaged, then they get a serious overload (remember the power outage in Moscow?).
In any case, you need to look at it closer, subscribed to participate in beta testing, waiting for an invitation. If you send and manage to see - I will tell more.