How Social Media can help deal with the Monsoons

This is probably a little premature considering it’s only March.

But I’m inspired by the winter  weather here in Boston. Snow, wind, storm – all that good stuff. Everyone’s updating their Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Brightkite accounts with references to snow. In fact, WeatherNewEngland.com even incorporates a Twitter stream on it’s home page. And got video blogger Steve Garfield to stream on their website.

It got me thinking. How awesome would life be during the monsoons if we had social media tools working out for us.

Say I wanted to drive from Bandra to Town side (anywhere from a 30min to 90min journey) and didn’t know which parts of Bombay were flooded. I could tweet a question and hope that someone who had just made the journey or lived in that area would get back to me. Real time help. Life would be so much easier.

Ideally, there could be a website that aggregates updates from a variety of social media sites. Say someone lives around Mahim pipeline and saw that a tree was blocking the roads. They could upload a photo to Flickr or Picasa and this website would catch it. Someone could tweet about traffic being congested at Haji Ali, and this website would catch it. This kind of technology already exists at www.Wiffiti.com (here’s an example). (disclaimer, I intern for Locamoda, the company that made that)

Also ideally, the website would organize stuff by location and there would be a different section for each part of the city. For example, I could click on the Andheri section to see updates that originated in Andheri alone. This site would even be helpful to people who commute using the trains. Instead of having to call friends and family to find out if the trains are running, just visit the website and look for tweets about the train schedules. They could be tweets directly from the govt.., SMS-es from people at the station, or tweets from local newspapers. And if you weren’t home but at the bus station and didn’t have your computer on you, you could use your smart phone to visit the mobile version of the site.

It would be the perfect solution, and a business model for something like this would be so simple. The site could be set up by a local news channel/newspaper whoever. And they could bring in local businesses as sponsors. Companies, shopping malls, theaters, restaurants – they’d all be interested! For example, Inifinity Mall could sponsor the Lokhandwala section. That way they’d get their name on a site that would have thousands of daily views, and they’d be able to help direct people into their stores when the weather is shitty outside — How’s that for new age marketing?

Think about how useful something like this would be not only for day-to-day lives, but for emergency situations as well.

Emergency notices could be posted on the site, straight from key government officials (they could even SMS critical information in themselves) and people could be working behind the scenes to moderate the user generated content so as to separate fact from fiction.

I’m going to stop here. But you get the picture right? I’m interested in your thoughts, does something similar to this already exist? And what kind of problems would prevent something like this from working out?