I’m delighted to announce that www.snowtweet.com is now live! snowtweet was a concept I thought up a couple of months ago, and I would like to say a MASSIVE thanks to the legendary Andreas over at nofont.com for bringing it to life! His design, coding and development has been brilliant, so thanks Andreas! (You can follow him on twitter @nofont, and I’m @jonmoss).

Concept

More and more people are using twitter these days, from Presidents to celebs, to Mums and students, it certainly seems to show no signs of slowing down. It even had another slot on Radio 4 this evening! Traditional ski reports have always been ok, but not current, live or with any real detail. snowtweet uses the twitter API to monitor tweets in real time, displaying “snow” related ones in the main part of the site and also showing ski, snowboard and afterski tweets at the top.

If you then scroll down, we have implemented a world map where you can click on a resort, and see tweets about that very place! It also pulls in data from a traditional snow report site and shows the weather too.

Getting real, live info from ski resorts can be really useful – finding out when it is actually snowing, getting to know the best bars and clubs, finding out, in real time, what is going!

Future plans

We are going to be developing and building on the first version over the spring and summer leading up to the 2009/2010 season. We are very interested to hear from companies, brands and resorts who would like to get involved – please email us >> info at snowtweet.com

Here’s to fresh powder and blue sky!

PS I’m very keen to promote cool projects, webapps and sites that you are all doing, so please do get in touch and we can highlight your work.

Personally, I’ve used twitter since the 21st November 2006, so I guess that makes me an early adopter! How do I know this? Just head on over to myfirstweet and it will tell you (and no need for giving up your password either). By the way, you can follow me here, but my username is jonmoss now and not mossman

From reporting of the terrible Mumbai attacks, to the Hudson river plan crash to the rise of the celebrity on twitter, it is getting a whole load of media coverage. There is wealth of information about twitter and how to use it for this, that and the other, how to gain a thousand followers, how to leverage it for marketing, and many, many more strategies and do’s and dont’s. I use twitter for a number of reasons:

• It’s fun
• It connects me to people who share the same interests
• It allows me to ask questions
• It is starting to function as a very personal search engine, or recommendation engine
• It is a very good news source
• It allows me to promote my own content
• It allows me to share other great content
• It allows communication within an organisation

And the list goes on! I’ve seen a number of friends jump aboard the twitter train recently and a few don’t get it and leave very quickly. I would always persevere, use twitter search to find like-minded people or friends and then just jump in. Simple. Don’t be shy, just do it!

The way people ‘tweet’ is also a hotly debated topic and techcrunch have just blogged about the most popular ways / applications. I went from the web, to twhirl to tweetdeck, which is IMHO, the best way to tweet full stop. You then also have the subject of mobile tweeting, and the iPhone has an array of apps that can help you here, from twitterific to tweetie (my fave).

So, a few questions for you all:

1. Do you tweet?!
2. What is your twittername? (It would be good to get a list of all the Hull Diggerati’s twitter names!)
3. What do you use it for?
4. And lastly, how do you tweet?

Fire away in the comments!