I discovered Twitterplan via a posting on Liz Azyan’s excellent blog – Twitterplan: The Newest Mashup in UK Local Government via her Twitterstream @liz_azyan .
Twitterplan is a new service that has been set up by Lichfield District Council with help from the City of Lincoln Council and Planning Alerts. It sends a Twitter direct message to you whenever a planning application is submitted in your area. Go to http://www.twitterplan.co.uk/ and follow the instructions on screen.
The service covers 324 local authorities at present and there is a list of participants on the Twitterplan web site. My own council – Reading Borough Council – are included, which surprised me. Reading BC do not seem to be that keen to embrace Web 2.0 technologies and their web site can be a nightmare to navigate. They may be in the list, I thought, but will they actually deliver? A few hours after I had signed up my first two DMs arrived!
I am impressed: click on the link and you are taken direct to the details on the authority’s web site. It beats having to carry out an advanced Google site search on the Reading BC web site and trawling through the local newspaper planning applications.
Disappointed that Edinburgh Council do not partake, their web presence is very good. Surprised that Fife council do however, I have a lot of clients there.
That surprises me as well. I had a message from one of the developers of Twitterplan explaining that they are using the data gathered for the email alert version at http://www.planningalerts.com/, which in turn is “scraped” from the council web sites. So the councils do not really have to do anything to be involved. Perhaps there are technical issues that prevent the Edinburgh data being gathered in this way or maybe they did not give their permission?