Let’s review the timeline:
- serious snow started falling in parts of Britain, last night
- by 6am this morning, folk were tagging tweets with “#uksnow”
- at some point someone tweeted this application where you tweet the first half of your postcode, and a rating out of 10 (eg: “RG27 1/10″ since it’s not currently snowing, just stable at 6”)
- and now there’s a proto weather map
- of course it’s skewed since it needs people to submit stuff, but the idea is cool and quickly implemented, no? “that a dog talks at all”, and so forth.
This is an “emergent application”, and this is what’s cool about the web today, and the accelerated timeline only makes it cooler. I don’t know if it will survive, I don’t much care, but that it exists at all is a wonder and exposes how the “startup and IPO/buyout” model of internet development, is not the only one that produces fast results.

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