Sure, more often than not, Twitter is used to spread fake celebrity deaths and spammy URLs that will supposedly teach you how to become rich online. However, every once in a while, that ever-popular micro-blogging site can actually surprise you. Last Friday, instead of being its usual shallow and self-absorbed self, the Twitterverse rallied to help find and save a South African mother from taking her own life. Memeburn reports that on Friday night, a Durban-based mother of two started posting dramatic tweets that are all along the lines of committing suicide. Her emotional tweets started at 9:17 pm, when she asked "how much alcohol one should consume before 'cutting an artery'." According to Memeburn, her posts continued, with each tweet becoming more dramatic than the last: "...Please don't save me, I just didn't want to die alone" "If u hate the mother of your kids, hurt her, leave her, break her down and take them from her and then isolate her. Take all she loves away." "...asking god almighty to forgive my final sin, love my angels, forgive my humanity, take my pain away." Seeing all the red flags in her tweets, the Twitter community quickly mobilized to track the woman down and prevent her from taking her life. The hastags #SaveGina and #FindGina were used to spread the word. Pretty soon, the issue caught national attention, thanks to Nicholas Dawes, editor of South Africa's weekly Mail and Guardian. Dawes (@NicDawes), also tweeted about the matter, asking his followers to speak up if they were aware of the woman's whereabouts. The frantic search ended early Saturday morning when @SynStalker and @etiennebeneke tweeted that the woman had been located and was with her family, safe and sound. A Learning Online Community While the events that took place on Friday and Saturday demonstrated just how powerful Twitter can be when used for good, what happened last weekend is also an implication of just how much the online community has grown recently. It looks like members of social networks have become more mature when it comes to dealing with suicidal posts. It wasn't always like this. It can be recalled that earlier this year, forty-two year old Simone Back committed suicide after posting a disturbing status message on Facebook that read, "Took all my pills be dead soon bye bye everyone." None of Back's 1082 online friends came to her rescue. Instead, her "friends" replied to her status message saying that it was "her choice," and some even went as far as calling her a liar. Hours later, the police broke down the door to her flat and found her dead. In 2010, Tyler Clementi, a Rutgers University student jumped off the Hudson River after posting "Jumping off the gw bridge sorry" on Facebook. Similarly, in that same year, a South Korean man and former DJ was found hanging from a ferry dock after he posted a suicide note on Twitter. After these events though, it seems that online communities have finally sat up to take suicidal posts more seriously. Of course, it's sad that it had to take several successful suicides before social networks came around, but better late than never, right?