Believe it or not, we use Twitter in a number of ways. We have an Open_TO, a Twitter account where, as we listen to the community, we trial balloon out some ideas and types of data that we're thinking of putting out there and see what people think about that. It's a great way, as David is saying, of feeling the pulse and understanding it in short bursts, but you certainly get it quickly. You also get some very quick reactions, so you don't have to go through these long, drawn-out interplays. You know very quickly what's actually happening.
Another aspect, believe it or not, in our 311 Twitter area, is they're actually keeping their finger on the pulse for another reason. If they're starting to see a theme developing out on Twitter, they actually could go and say, “Wait a minute, let's go and put someone out there”--if there's graffiti or potholes or something. They could actually go out and fix it before a request comes in, in terms of a proactive service request. What that does is this. They have technology that says there were 3,000 people who asked for the same thing. Let's do it once.
So what Twitter does is it actually allows you to see what is happening out there, and you get a sense of it in terms of the day-to-day and minute-to-minute goings on in your local community. You could also expand that out, but I agree, you have to understand it. You have to start to understand the types of language and the way you can leverage it and use the different kinds of hashtags. There are different ways you could do it.
It's interesting. We worked with the University of Toronto on some ideas around perhaps putting some metadata around Twitter and tweets, to get a sense of what we could do to improve the depth of it. It's a very short burst. There are ways you can put links and all that so you can see what people are really getting to in a deeper sense. But is there a way to actually make the feed itself more intelligent? So there's some thinking going on in that space that could even improve it further.
In its current state, it's still incredibly useful. The themes and rooms out there, the discussions, are great to follow. As I said, we're using it in a number of ways, testing what we're doing out there, but also monitoring out there to see what's happening so we can proactively service the citizens.