When dealing with the government, I always believed that emailing was the most ineffective approach to being heard because emails are so easily ignored.
This is true for big issues like giving the schools more money and re-legalizing gay marriage. That is not what this service is for, though; it's for "there's grafitti at the intersection of Foo St. and Bar Ln."
Twitter makes it easy to report problems like this, which means the graffiti-removal crews don't have to drive around looking for things to fix. They can be dispatched directly to a problem location. (Of course, email and phone calls would work just as well... but when you are just wandering around, tweeting from your phone is easier than sending an email or calling them up.)
Even Chicago gets things like this right (call in a problem, crew comes and fixes it), so I'd be really surprised if SF ignored these tweets.
This is true for big issues like giving the schools more money and re-legalizing gay marriage. That is not what this service is for, though; it's for "there's grafitti at the intersection of Foo St. and Bar Ln."
Twitter makes it easy to report problems like this, which means the graffiti-removal crews don't have to drive around looking for things to fix. They can be dispatched directly to a problem location. (Of course, email and phone calls would work just as well... but when you are just wandering around, tweeting from your phone is easier than sending an email or calling them up.)
Even Chicago gets things like this right (call in a problem, crew comes and fixes it), so I'd be really surprised if SF ignored these tweets.