I have two main things that I do on Twitter:
1 – Connect and converse with the tech world
2 – Find out what’s happening around Nashville
Beyond these, I of course use Twitter for other things as well, but these are the two main ways.
Over the past few months a new, unofficial network named TwitZip has popped up on Twitter, offering hyperlocal news from your ZIP code. For those of you in other parts of the world, the US ZIP code is a 5-digit postal code specific to different areas in each state.
So let’s say that you wanted to find out what’s happening in Nashville, TN. A quick stop over to Twitter user @37201 would give you a heads up on what’s up. The down side, of course, being that the Nashville area has 13 different ZIP codes…but that’s somewhat the point of it being hyperlocal.
TwitZip is partnered with outside.in to aggregate blog content from each specific ZIP, and it also partners with Groupon so you can expect to see the deal of the day for your area in the Twitter feed.
Presently, according to the TwitZip site, the focus is on news, blogs and crime. However, weather and local government alerts shouldn’t be too far behind. Not content to be a fly-by-night program, TwitZip aims to be a “foundational piece of location based messaging in the US”.
Give a check of your ZIP. It’s certainly worth a look.
TwitZip is a great new feature. Other social media outlets have similar features where you can locate people/things via your location and zip code.
We have tried a slightly different approach to providing news with our @topix_local Twitter service. If you follow it, it will look at the location field of your Twitter account and try to resolve that (zipcode, lat/lng, etc) into a city and give you breaking news for that city as in @reply.
If you don’t like it… you can unfollow @topix_local and the alerts will automatically stop. Try and it give us feedback.