Harrison, Stuart wrote: > Just a quick note to announce a little project I’ve been working on > (with a little help from Lincoln City Council) is now live, > http://www.twitterplan.co.uk/ uses the Planning Alerts API to send > alerts of local planning applications via Twitter. It’s still in alpha > phase at the mo, but feel free to sign up, I’d be interested to see if > anyone has any feedback.
Why, and in what way, is twitter the right channel for this? Twitter is designed, and best used, for immediate, transitory, concise and low-importance data that you're unlikely to detail for or to refer back to, or for keeping low-level "ambient" contact with particular individuals. I really don't see that it's suited for infrequent, non-time-sensitive data from large organsisations, or for information on which you might want to refer back. Surely email is a far better transmission medium for this project - which is a highly valid one, but completely mistargetted on twitter. Twitter's a very popular bandwagon at the moment, but it's not the only communication medium out there, and it's not suited for use as, or to replace RSS (http://twitterfeed.com/), email, news (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology) advertising (http://search.twitter.com/search?q=I+bought+the+%40MacHeist+3+Bundle) or IRC (http://www.understandingmarketing.com/2009/02/26/smbiz/) Just because a technology's trendy, or because you can see a way to join two technologies together, doesn't mean that making that join adds anything of value. Better availability of planning data is certainly useful; twitter is certainly "cool". I'm not sure that such a combination is either. Richard -- Blog: http://phase.org Twitter: @parsingphase _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
