Rare UK Snow Blizzard Brings Out the Twitter Mashups
There’s nothing like a breaking news event to show off the usefulness of Twitter. Today large swathes of the UK were blanketed in snow, but the Twitter feeds and mashups came to the rescue of anyone wanting real-time updates about what was happening.
One of the most useful was the feeds provided by Ben Smith (@bensmithuk) who built UK Trains Wiki which Tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators. The original data is processed and shortened to less than 140 characters (in most cases) by Yahoo Pipes and tweeted via Twitterfeed which also adds a short-link back to the original BBC report. It’s enabled by travel news feeds from the BBC (via BBC Backstage).
The more fanciful but ‘nice to look at’ Twitter mashup came from Ben Marsh who coded the #uksnow mashup, pictured above. This is a Google map which maps reports of snow from UK Twitterers. They simply Tweet the first half of their postcode and a score out of 10 for their local snow cover e.g."#uksnow E1 4/10″.
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