Facebook announces new feature for use during disasters

In a sign that Facebook took social media interactions seriously despite their frivolous nature, the social network has introduced its latest new feature intended for use only durations.

Facebook unveiled the feature today in Japan, which allows Safety Check notifications to be pushed to users when a natural disaster hit the area users had listed as their location, or where they had recently logged in from.

Tech companies like Google and Facebook had worked to connect people after significant disasters in the past, and according to Facebook, the project was an extension of the Disaster Message Board its Japanese engineers rolled out after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami there.

Safety Check was rolling out globally on Android, iOS, feature phones and the desktop and there was a demo video (embedded after the break) to explain how it all worked.

A simple I'm safe / I'm not in the area set of buttons could push an update (and comments, if they had entered them) that would be visible only to people on users' friends list, intended to quickly give some piece of mind when they noticed a USGS report for their zipcode -- or worse.

If users had friends who were in the area of a natural disaster, there was a notification when they checked-in as safe that could take them to a list of their updates.

Meanwhile, the social network said in a blog post, ''In times of disaster or crisis, people turn to Facebook to check on loved ones and get updates,'' wrote the company in a blog post about the feature. ''It is in these moments that communication is most critical both for people in the affected areas and for their friends and families anxious for news.''

According to Facebook, the feature originated from lessons it had learned and work on it started to in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

''Our engineers in Japan took the first step toward creating a product to improve the experience of reconnecting after a disaster,'' the company wrote. ''They built the Disaster Message Board to make it easier to communicate with others. They launched a test of the tool a year later and the response was overwhelming.''