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Boston Fire Department having a bit of an identity crisis

By Innismir on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 6:39pm

First, there was @Boston_Fire merrily tweeting away. Then, suddenly @BostonFire comes along and states:

@Boston_Fire is not a department sanctioned feed @bostonfire is the official Twitter site of the Boston Fire Department

Now, after a hasty apology, @Boston_Fire tweeted:

This feed will not be updated until further notice. Please refer to @bostonfire, the Official Feed of the Boston Fire Department

So, is @BostonFire real? A prank? Will the real Boston Fire Department please stand up?

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Comments

By adamg on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 11:15pm.

First came the Boston Police Twitter feed, which is official and all and was started by John Daley, who gave us BPDNews.com and whose title I can, alas, never remember (except he's pretty high up, like deputy superintendent).

A Boston firefighter thought that was a cool idea and so set up Boston_Fire to provide the same sort of updates.

Unbeknownst to him (but now knownst to us), the city is, in fact, working to set up official Twitter feeds for the other two emergency services - Fire and EMS (oh, please, please, please include the Urban Paramedic's links in the EMS feed). Police came first because they already had a feed to play with (the RSS feed from BPDNews).

bostonfire was sort of rushed online to deal with Boston_Fire. Now the firefighter has basically shut off Boston_Fire to avoid confusion with bostonfire - which, yes, will be the official feed.

I don't know how things work in the BFD, but I'd hope he gets some sort of props for thinking creatively.

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By Kaz on Thu, 03/19/2009 - 11:30pm.

I hope he's given some credit too. The level of detail about each call was pretty cool and reminds me of sitting around listening to a band scanner.

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