We have been able to follow random tweets by geographic location on a map via Twittervision and Twittermap but other than fun, it isn't that useful in our opinion. What if you wanted to follow all tweets from the city of London, UK. Well now you can. TwitterWhere lets you input a location and a radius (1 mile away, 5 miles away etc). Once you do this, submit your selection and TwitterWhere will create an RSS feed and an XML feed that you can follow in your feed reader.

While we don't have an immediate use for this, many of you will find it handy for sure.

They also have a Adobe Apollo desktop application available too.

Here is a screenshot from their website.

Have you ever wished that you could quickly get an email or just read all your favorite twitterers in one shot instead of following all day? Don't have time to follow twitter all the time? Now there is a service just for you. It is called Twitter Digest and it does just that.

First you enter the twitter user names that you want to follow.  Well actually that is it!  You are given both a web page and a RSS feed that you can watch that will deliver all their tweets of the previous day all in one place, one one page.   Now how is that for convenient for all you busy bodies out there!

Here is a screenshot: 

Today we got a message in about using twitter in the homeland security field. It is another great use for twitter and in an emergency when phone lines are down should prove an excellent tool. We hope that emergency never comes, but if it does...

"I'm a homeland security strategist with a reputation for innovative
strategies to empower the general public through creative use of the
personal communication devices (ie cell phones) and apps (i.e. Twitter)
that we use every day and will use in a disaster whether or not officials
want us to.

As part of my "21st-century disaster tips you WON'T hear from officials"
series on YouTube, I've just posted perhaps the most important one of all:
http://tinyurl.com/2v5las -- about using Twitter messages, which WILL get
through because they're text and use so little bandwidth, vs. voice calls,
which only frustrate you because you won't get through, while crashing the
networks. 

W. David Stephenson
"The Homeland Security 2.0" blog: http://stephensonstrategies.com "

A great use for twitter David! 

We have stumbled upon the American Red Cross's Twitter page today. It is really great that public services are taking up the use of new technologies so quickly.

There is nothing on their main web page to indicate that they are using Twitter though, we couldn't find it anyway. Maybe they need a Twitter Badge to let people know!

Are there any other public services that you know of that are using Twitter? Let us know in the comments!

UPDATE - There is more info on the service here in this blog entry .  There is two parts to the service actually.  The second part (and second twitter account) is here at twitter.com/safeandwell.  This part of the service is intended for disasters where people get lost, hurt and killed.  It will be used to locate people and families and victims can reunite or be reassured that loved ones are indeed OK. 

We received this product launch notification by the guys at TwitterMail.  Here is their message verbatim:

"TwitterMail.com, launched yesterday, is a spectacular new addition to Twitter.com !

TwitterMail allows you to send posts via email to Twitter.com and notifies you via email if there are personal replies.

Why is this so spectacular? Because it changes Twitter from a 'pull' platform into a 'push' platform. No more reloading and browsing back looking for replies. You simply check your email and see if there were any reactions. Then you can reply via email or browse to Twitter.com to continue the conversation.

And there are a lot more features:

- Post to Twitter -
Send an e-mail to your secret TwitterMail address. The body of the message will be published in your Twitter Profile. For a normal message, you should always leave the subject-line empty.

- Get new replies in your mailbox -
If a friend send you a post on twitter (by using @yourusername) we will send it to your emailaddress. You can enable/disable this in your settings.

- Get the Timeline -
Send a message with 'Friends' as the subject and you will recieve one message with the last 20 posts from all of your friends.

- Send a book -
At Twitter.com you only have 140 characters to tell your story. But if you use TwitterMail we will keep the full message here and post the first 140 characters to Twitter with a 'Read More' link at the end.

- Future Tweets -
Schedule your posts: Add a time to your subject-line when you want you post to be published. Example: "21:00" will publish your post at 21:00 (9 PM) GMT+1. Make your friends believe you are Twittering day and night.

Notes:
TwitterMail was built by Lennaert Ekelmans (Development) and Bram Kok (Design) and is based on an OpenIdea by Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten.

Original OpenIdea 

Twittermail 
"
 

Twitigg is a new site that takes all of the articles, links and videos posted in Twitter and then reposts them to a website so you can view them. The idea is that it counts the number of times that each article is posted in the twittersphere.  Then you can see how popular each story / link is by the number of people submitting it.  

When we first looked at Twitigg, we were put off by a couple of things.
- We couldn't vote on the stories.
- There is a lot of bad data. Maybe not bad data per-se but it looks like the Twitigg site can not handle some international character sets so there is a lot of funky symbols all over the site.
- The design is terrible.  The site itself looks like a standard installation of the Pligg content management software.

Twitigg is a great idea if they can iron out the bugs, get the data cleaned, get UTF 8 and pretty things up a bit. But how will it stand up in the real world until then?