Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Tweet..... you're in a tornado...

The Weather Channel is now* using Twitter to send severe weather alerts. This, I think, is a great use of Twitter! Now there's one more reason to get an iPhone - so I can access Twitter via 3G where and where there is no 802.11 Internet.

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* I hate typos.

3 comments:

joewxboy said...

weather.com would like to send out severe weather alerts (SWAs), but there are over 70,000 different locations in the domestic US. I'd hate to have to set up 70,000 different twitter accounts just to make sure that all SWAs are available on twitter.

Alternatively, we'd have to allow you to register your twitter account and then send individual direct messages. That won't scale very well, and people tend not to like registering for yet another service.

Any other ideas?

Tanner Lovelace said...

There's actually no need to get an iPhone. You can set "notifications" on on a per user basis and then just have them sent to your cell phone over a txt message.

Joe's concerns seem more of a problem with this service, though. This was tried once, I think, with traffic reports and it didn't work very well then.

This might go better on something like BrightKite that inherently takes location into effect.

Parlez à la Main said...

Very true about all the possible areas in the US not to mention types of weather events that could be issues for each area. But I'm a weather junkie at heart so I don't mind a lot of tweets on the subject. In fact I'll probably set up a weather-specific twitter account if I can find enough weather-related twitter content.