The Amber Alert program has helped find 525 abducted children in the past 15 years. Its methods of communication include radio, television, digital billboards and text messaging. The idea of adding Facebook is to spread notifications to more people and more quickly in the crucial hours after a child is abducted.

You can find a directory of the Facebook Amber Alert pages here (it looks like there was a previous independently developed Facebook application of the same name that is still leading search results, for the time being). Facebook is also contributing 50 million advertising impressions to promote the program.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

And so yesterday the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to develop an emergency-alert system that would broadcast SMS messages to cellphones and other mobile devices wherever a crisis occurs. The Commercial Mobile Alert System, as it’s been dubbed, will deliver three different types of text alerts to mobile phone subscribers: presidential alerts concerning terrorist attacks and whatnot; imminent threat alerts warning of natural disasters; and Amber Alert child abduction warnings.

Sounds like a nice comprehensive program. Too bad you won’t see it for another two years, at least. Unless you happen to live in a region like Contra Costa County in Northern California, where a tech-savvy local government is already hard at work on its own geographically targeted emergency alert system.