7 Minutes

In a first of it's kind study, Purdue University tested 10,000 students on how quickly a text message alert can spread throughout it's campus. This is interesting in terms of emergency announcements and response, but also from the aspect of how quickly political and social issue organizations can get key or timely news or call to action to it's entire distributed user group. The result in the case of the Purdue study was 7 minutes with reaching virtually the entire study group. "Nearly 10,000 students and faculty members agreed to receive a text message at 11:25 a.m. and respond as quickly as possible... "The answer, at least in this case, is seven minutes. That's how long it took his team to send out 9,979 text messages. Replies started coming back within the first minute, he said. Only about 30 people didn't get the text message."