This is not a case of a patent troll sitting on an idea and attempting to charge a toll from anyone who uses it without themselves developing it. This is a company that actually went out and built a business and spent a fair amount of effort making sure that they could defend it. And now they are.
It seems more like they invented a hammer that's custom-designed to pound nails with a square head. No one has a better hammer for that. And then Twitter made a hammer that can pound nails with any kind of head, and does it good enough most of the time. Twitter just happened to solve a more general problem than TechRadium did.
It feels unwholesome because Twitter isn't really a system for sending mass emergency alerts to people. That just happens to be one application of being able to send short messages to a host of devices. And, really, Twitter wouldn't even be in competition with ISIS if it hadn't become absurdly popular for reasons that have nothing to do with emergency alerts. The feeling here of suing someone for getting so popular that an infrastructure has grown around them that lets them do what you do is, again, unwholesome.
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7130389/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7362852/claims.html http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7418085/claims.html
It seems their technology is more push, that is, one person submits a message and their software will then broadcast it via email, SMS, phone, etc, and will even translate the message to a target language. Twitter is pull; it doesn't push. Other third parties might do the pushing, but Twitter, nope.
Also, the last two patents seem to be more business related, applying the first patent to schools and government organizations, which to me, is a painfully obvious use of the first patent (and in my world, the other two would not have been issued, but we're not on my world).
The first claims of each of those patents states that there must be "user selected priority information that indicates a contact order for the user contact device" and that there should be "a priority order for contacting each user contact device within the group". Twitter doesn't do that, and all the other claims rely on the first.