Twitter Helps Finds Missing Child Faisal Fri--In Just Three Hours

According to reports, caring Tweeters this week helped reunite a family with their missing son in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

A photo and description of missing 16-year-old Faisal Fri hit the Twittersphere on Wednesday, and the hashtag #faisalDH quickly became a hotly retweeted topic.

Faisal was found just three hours later, writes TheNextWeb.

Twitter user @Omar_Othman tweeted the initial alert, which @Modhayan translated to English.

Though fewer than 300 people follow @Modhayan's Twitter feed, his translated post made it to Twitter's list of Top Tweets, TheNextWeb reports.

"Finding #FaisalDH the kid who got lost this morning proves to me that Twitter can do it all, thank you all who participated in this. #Saudi," tweeted @Hokail, one of the concerned Tweeters who helped spread the word of Faisal's disappearance.

Comments

[lilylee86]

03:30 AM on 04/11/2011

Social networking is quite good.
Joyfax Server

[Omar Othman]

04:09 AM on 04/09/2011

really it was an amazing moment that we shared with the guys in eastern province in Saudi Arabia all all the people had been passion about finding the kid .. really i didn't imagine what happened that night and we are all proud of Twitter that help our communication and make it productive until we find the kid

[Plaidavenger]

12:39 AM on 04/09/2011

What a tweet story! See? Social networking can be a good thing!

[DMSmith]

12:09 AM on 04/09/2011

Improving communication is always good. It's that simple.

[SethS]

05:09 PM on 04/08/2011

Good that social media can help in this case, but it's got to stop with Charlie Sheen - that's just a train wreck.

[DennyCrane]

04:44 PM on 04/08/2011

Maybe it can find those WMDs Bush kept telling us about.

[drularter]

02:14 PM on 04/08/2011

I get told that the being online so much achieves nothing. Well, I hate to tell the people that think that, but, look at what a small amount of connected people did in a short time!

[HumbleGenius]

11:57 AM on 04/08/2011

Social media can help find a child in just three hours.

It can help lose a child in just a few minutes.

[daniellerenea]

12:10 PM on 04/08/2011

I'm sorry, but how can it help lose a child in a few minutes?

[HumbleGenius]

12:18 PM on 04/08/2011

I wasn't being entirely serious, but it is true that if a child isn't careful while using social media they can be targeted by predators who pretend to be someone they're not.

[Suraj Vibhute]

02:08 PM on 04/11/2011

That's true!

[Querent]

10:11 AM on 04/08/2011

The poor kid was probably trying to play hookey.

[DejzaVoo]

09:45 AM on 04/08/2011

Whatever works. I personally don't use twitter (more of a facebook girl) but twitter really seems to shine in times like natural disasters and now missing people. I understand facebook and twitter are really different things, and I like how you can find info and conversations in twitter. I might start using it more who knows!

Twitter would be that much better if when you posted images, at least the thumbnails were available in the feed and you could click to open it in a light box while staying on twitter.

[djdurrani]

10:07 AM on 04/08/2011

Facebook is cluttered now. Twitter at least keeps it simple.