As Pete Cashmore of Mashable, Dan Farber of CNet and many others have reported Twitter and social media in general are playing a huge part in receiving accurate and timely information from the crisis in Mumbai.

While not in those leagues, in the last twenty four hours I’ve received notice of a number of posts written by bloggers looking to help people keep an eye on the events unfolding in Mumbai in real time and linking to http://spy.appspot.com/find/#Mumbai some of them written by people with family and friends too near to the events… I am floored… This tool I created largely on a whim had no delusions of helping people in situations like these but none the less I am humbled to see that it has helped even one person in a context like this. It appears at some points the use ‘spy’ was seeing peaks at almost eight times the average number of requests per second from the previous days… wow…

It’s true social media opens many personal opportunities… to flatten your company’s ladder, to enable passion in any niche space, to truly listen to your customers, constituents or opponents… but surely filling in this vital communication gap, reporting on a critical and emotionally charged event in a personal and unfiltered way, enabling people to keep closer to events effecting their families… is enough for me to say these channels are here to stay. Yes some folks tweet very inane events of their life, but today even skeptics need to step back and see just what these open channels allow.