Twitter-based local web apps are another way newsrooms can use twitter
Last November I mentioned Foamee, the ‘Twitter Piggyback’ web site / service that allows you to keep track of beers you owe people.
Well, there’s another Twitter Piggybacker (hat tip to Adam Howell for the term and the link), this one with a local information bent: Commuter Feed. To quote,
Commuter Feed is a free service that lets you post reports on traffic and transit delays in your local area using Twitter.
Commuter Feed is a community-generated traffic report, published by anybody stuck in traffic with a twitter account and a cell phone. You can subscribe to the traffic reports for your area, and get twits when something new pops up. Will this work? Possibly — seems like exposure will be Commuter Feeds biggest challenge. Do newspaper-dot-coms have the same exposure challenges for the web apps and communities they launch? No, no they don’t.
So while some news organizations (such as my employer) are getting busy doing the shovel-dump publish of their headlines onto twitter, well, there are other people out there looking for ways to share and make local information more useful to the folk who live there.