Time for TERROR

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 theproblemwas 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 wasremindedof 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 ofrequirementsfor anypoliticalparty to get my vote in 2011. I've just added this to the list.