Real time

Snow
Today it has snowed where I live. Not much, but enough to fully mess up all public and non-public forms of transport. What is the first thing that you do? Right, check what's happening on the news. Nowadays, you don't have to wait, but go on the internet and pick out your favorite news site. There I found some information, but a lot was outdated. Even the newest articles were partly re-edits and re-quotes of previous articles.

What about public transport sites? The organisation that controls the trains was out of the air. The one concerning buses had information that was updated roughly each hour. But how is it really? On a minute to minute or even on a second to second basis?

Twitter
Did you ever try to convince your (grand)parents to use for instance a computer or mobile phone? How often (although there are exceptions) they are reluctant to try new things? I had this with Twitter, almost. As if a new generation is slowly creeping up on me. Not yet! I am slowly discovering Twitter and everything around it (shortened urls, tweetpics, etc etc).

To get the best impression of what was going on in the country, I used Twitter. It gave me by far the best impression of what is going on and kept me from joining thousands of others on a railway station where hardly any train would come.

Keeping up
Interestingly, companies start realizing the have to keep up with social media such as Twitter. The bus and railway companies have their own Twitter account for instance. Sadly the frequency of updates drops severely after five o'clock. The news site links Twitter feeds to their news articles, displaying real time information concerning the subject.

Ambiguous
The information on Twitter is hard to interpret for a computer, although the sheer mass of things has given rise to some cool applications. Hash tagging adds information value to tweets, but that is about it. This means I still needed a lot of time to get a good overview of what  was going on. Luckily I had all the time of the world, since there was no transport available anyway.