dessalles

The phenomenon known as “spring” descended on New York City today. As is always the case on the first 70° day of the year, myself and many other office-bound New Yorkers intently watched the temperature outside climb one exhilarating degree at a time. While this was once was an activity facilitated by docks, system trays and menu bars, over the last couple years it has increasingly become a ritual dominated by mobile phones. And this year, more than any other, the process of obsessively checking for weather updates on my phone seemed strangely familiar.

Having recently started using Twitter, amongst a number of other services, I’ve grown accustomed to managing a continuous stream of incoming text messages and status updates. But with the weather taking priority, caught between push and pull, my mobile phonesmanship fell into total anarchy today - workflows disrupted, tweets neglected, statuses unchecked. I went online in search for weather updates via Twitter; sure enough, there was no shortage of options. And it makes total sense. Before there were News Feeds, Action Streams, micro-blogs and status updates, the only constant stream of bite-sized information to obsess over was weather. And weather services were among the first to recognize our desire to constantly monitor the status of something personally relevant. So hats off to WeatherBug and co.

Unfortunately, none of the feeds offer the degree-to-degree precision I wanted, so I passed. But I’d be curious to see if such granular updates would have the same impact on my familiarity with weather as it does with my familiarity of the people I follow on Twitter. While I’m sure it’d be extremely annoying to recieve a text message with every temperature change, I’d like to imagine being that in tune with the weather would unleash some sort of farmer’s meteorological sixth sense.

And what if we could follow the polar ice cap on Twitter? Get me some blogging glaciers too.