Love it or hate it, Twitter is becoming an increasingly popular website. However it"s not just about what your friends are eating for breakfast or watching on YouTube, Twitter can also be a very useful tool providing you with the latest information in a quick and concise format - especially useful when you"re out and about.
Some of the latest utilities available through the service are weather forecasts so you can get short and sharp updates telling you when there"s going to be a short, sharp shower. AccuWeather.com has been offering Twitter bots for a while now, providing weather updates at 7AM and 4PM every day for a large selection of US cities and other international locations. A quick search on Twitter brings up even more bots, including some that cleverly change their profile images to a different weather icon to match the current conditions.
Now the BBC has jumped in on the act but instead of using an automated bot the service provides more personal tweets and is powered by - shock-horror! - humans. The weather team from Look North (North East and Cumbria) proudly claim that that are "the first BBC weather presenters to start forecasting by Tweets" and are currently even offering bespoke weather forecasts to people who give them a time and place in the local region via one of Twitter"s famous @replies.
You may be thinking that this seems a bit of an absurd idea with a huge selection of websites offering forecasts for your location and even numerous iPhone apps (or equivalents) that you can use whilst on the move, but surely getting a more personalised, up-to-date and made to measure outlook on the weather is a lot better. What do you think? Share your thoughts below.