No, acronyms have never been my strength.

My CorkProbs idea on Twitter back in 2007 never got any traction. Mainly because there were possibly 10 people in Cork on Twitter at the time. The idea was simply that locals would tweet @CorkProbs about problems related to roads, electricity, gas, water etc and the account would re-tweet them. It was prompted by a water outage in Bandon where no-one in the Council could tell us what the problem was or take responsibility for finding out. The Twitter SMS interface was a big reason I thought it would catch on with normal people. Ah well.

I was reminded of it again during the floods and freezing of November 2009. But it was really this winter where Twitter became the de-facto reporting system for weather, roads, floods and water outages. Irish Weather Online almost made Met Eireann redundant in the past few weeks as we watched live reporting of the movement of snow across the country on #IWO.

I genuinely think Twitter has made the leap to being a Public Service Utility and should become a mandatory reporting system for all County Councils around the country. Of course being Ireland, we'll probably hire Bearing Point and pay them €100m to build a bad Irish knock-off of it instead.

I've been building my list of requirements for any political party to get my vote in 2011. I've just added this to the list.