All too often, I have ideas which might make a cool website or iPhone app or whatever and I know I just don't have the time to build them. I'm going to post them here in the hope that someone else might find a use for them. These ideas might already be in existence, of course. I'm not claiming they are unique in any way (although some might be).
You are free to take these ideas and do whatever you like with them. Of course, if they become amazingly successful, I could do with a bigger TV...
This is a more general version of the #uksnow map idea. It's a crowd-sourced weather map which relies on the fact that any one individual tweet about the weather might be inaccurate but given a large enough sample, enough people will mention the weather in their area to make this a workable idea. It doesn't require people to tweet in a particular format.
Have an array of weather words in various languages (rain, hail, snow, schnee, ame, yuki) every 5 minutes: foreach weatherword search twitter for that word http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=rain retrieve latest 100 tweets foreach get user info http://twitter.com/users/show.xml?screen_name=username get user.location if available geocode save: username, time, lat, long, geotude, weatherword Remove any tweets about this weatherword older than 6 hours.
Show a Google map Based on current Zoom level, split the current map into about 100 geotudes foreach geotude search database for any weather results for that block (probably using an ilike "1234%" on the geotude field) sort by weatherword count descending draw an icon on top of that block to show the most common weatherword If the user zooms in, recalculate geotudes and repeat.
I quite like that this uses geotudes which I think are an excellent idea.
