IT’S true: some of the people hell-bent on stealing from high street shops around the country last week stayed in touch with one another using services such as Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messenger.
But those internet services are not to blame for causing the riots. Taking action against them – which David Cameron said last week he was considering – would be misguided.
The internet was far more useful in the aftermath of the riots, helping to clean up the mess and identify the culprits.
Online map services helped by showing people where the worst trouble was, so they could avoid it. Cravify.com, a site normally used for finding flatshares and jobs in the capital, added a ‘riots’ category to its list of maps.
Within hours of the rioting ending in Croydon, south London, some bright spark set up the RiotCleanUp account on Twitter (twitter.com/riotcleanup).
At the time of writing, it had an impressive 87,000 followers, and inspired copycat accounts for organising community clean-ups in Wolverhampton, Birmingham, Manchester and Leicester.
Volunteers were asked to bring dustpans, brooms and rubbish sacks. Full details of clean-up events and success stories are being posted at www.riotcleanup.com.
The Metropolitan Police filled its Flickr stream (www.flickr.com/photos/metropolitanpolice) with photos of people it wants to identify following the violence.
People also did what they could to help Malaysian student Ashraf Haziq, who was mugged as he lay bleeding in the street. There’s more about that idea at somethingniceforashraf.tumblr.com.
STORE, SHARE, SEND
Yousendit (www.yousendit.com) is best known as a useful way of sending large files from one computer to another.
Now it’s expanding, with the launch of loads of new features and an online storage service. You can still send files, but you can also save them directly to Yousendit, and share your folders there with other people.
There’s also a clever gadget for signing documents digitally without having to print them out first. A basic service with 2GB of storage is free, and you can pay if you need more space.
THING OF THE WEEK
Amazing stop-motion ad shot with a mobile phone: vimeo.com/26877221