“There are several resources that are absolutely critical in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, including food, water, medicines, sanitation and so on,” he explained.
“Alongside these, information and communication are vital resources too. We think it's fair to say that, in disaster areas, technology can help save lives."
As well as relying on the public and aid agencies to provide information, Google.org has encouraged Japan’s temporary shelters to help. On the wall of each shelter is a poster listing the personal details of its guests. Using Optical Character Recognition software, Google.org has been able to convert mobile phone photographs of the posters to text data for upload to the Japan Person Finder.
Stories of how the site has set many minds at rest are beginning to emerge. Among Google’s own staff, Kei Kawai, a senior product manager at the firm’s Silicon Valley headquarters, located his grandfather-in-law, who lived in one of the small coastal towns wiped out by the tsunami.
The service is not flawless, however. The family of Brian Hickebottom, a British teacher based near the devastated coastal town Sendai, were distressed by a “sick” message posted on his page after he was named as missing in media reports. “Lucas A’s” message said: “I have received information that this person is dead.”
Mr Hickebottom later emailed his sister in South Wales to confirm he was safe, sheltering at his school with his Japanese wife and their daughter.
“That’s really frustrating for us because were have to rely on people to supply correct information,” said Mr Yood.
Nevertheless, Google.org does not intend to attempt verify posts to future Person Finder sites, such as by forcing users to log in, because the aim is to gather and disseminate as much information as possible. It will instead rely on users to report malicious or incorrect postings.
Of course, Google.org’s high-speed coding efforts on Friday would have counted for nothing if Japan’s internet infrastructure had not stood up to the disaster.
An oft-repeated fallacy about the internet, derived from a RAND Corporation study on voice networking for the US military in 1964, is that it was designed to withstand a nuclear war.
No such apocalyptic invulnerability was ever sought by the creators of ARPANET, the direct forebear of the internet, but they did aim to build a network of networks that would be resilient as a whole even if parts of it failed. The success of the project meant Japanese broadband connections have been more useful than fixed and mobile phone lines in the aftermath of the earthquake.
Japan’s online infrastructure – the big fibre optic cables and heavy duty routers that direct data traffic to and from millions of individual broadband lines – was virtually unaffected, according to RIPE, an organisation that coordinates technical development of the internet. It measured around two per cent fewer blocks of Japanese internet addresses after the earthquake, but noted that “changes of this magnitude are quite normal on the internet”.
“This observation is by no means indicative of the earthquake impacting internet operations… [and] serves to highlight the resilience of the internet.”
The resilience built into the internet meant that while broadband lines in regions hit by the tsunami may have been cut, the national network survived. Similarly, there was minor damage to some of the 20 undersea cables that link Japanese networks to the rest of the world, but traffic could take alternative routes.
And while fixed and mobile phone lines were jammed by people attempting to contact loved ones, internet traffic, including VoIP services like Skype, kept flowing.
Facebook, by far the dominant social network, quickly became the first resort for many to get in touch online. Displaced people, for example, could log in from anywhere and tell all their friends and family they were safe with just one status update, without the need to remember dozens of email addresses. On March 11 the first day of the crisis Facebook counted 4.5 million status updates that mentioned “Japan,” “earthquake” or “tsunami”.
Zynga, a social network games developer best known for FarmVille, is meanwhile using its massive reach on Facebook to raise money for Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children Emergency Fund. Special charity “virtual goods” have been on offer to players since Friday evening, and raised more than $1m in 36 hours.
And it is not just the public and charities who have taken advantage of the web’s mass communication abilities in response to the earthquake and tsunami. The International Atomic Energy Agency, apparently aware of how misinformation can spread online, has begun posting its official briefings on the ongoing crisis at the Fukushima nuclear reactors on YouTube and Facebook., with regular updates on Twitter, too.
