34SP.com Client Mashes Up Snowfall

As anyone who has a heartbeat in the UK now knows – it’s SNOWING! But if you try to get a satellite image of the snowfall in real time, you can’t. That’s because the cloud cover prevents the satellite from seeing the ground.

That’s where a brilliant new Twitter / Google maps mashup from 34SP.com customer, Ben Marsh, comes in.

Ben’s very clever idea was to get the general UK Twitter population to report on the snowfall at their location in the UK. Respondents report their postcode and then select a number from 1-10 to rate the snowfall amount. Ben’s mashup then graphically displays the results using a Google satellite map of the UK. – giving you a real-time graphical map of the snowfall amounts as reported by people who are actually there on the ground.

You can view Ben’s mashup here: http://www.benmarsh.co.uk/snow.

The app was so clever and hugely popular that it has been reported about in various news sites around the world. The authoritative and stalwart website for the BBC linked out to Ben’s creation. You can see the UK TechCrunch coverage here as well. Despite the massive additional traffic to the site and the bandwidth requirements to keep it live, 34SP.com has stepped up to the challenge.

Great work Ben! Now please excuse me, I need to go shovel some snow.