dale lane

I filled my car with petrol today.

Not normally something I’d blog about, but I wanted to write a quick post about mymilemarker.com because I don’t see many people using it.

The idea is fairly simple – a web app that you use to record when you fill your car with petrol, that can then work out useful figures like your average mileage and car’s fuel efficiency.

I came across it because you can update your record from twitter, and any excuse to find another way to use twitter is always good. 🙂

It’s fairly American-ized, so I have to remember to read “miles” everywhere it says “kilometers”. But I quite like it. It’s interesting to see that I do about 9 miles per litre on average, and that if I carry on like I have been in the last few months, I will spend about £390 a year on petrol.

Once they get more users and a bigger store of previous updates behind them, I can see this being a useful information resource. They record the make and model of your car with your updates, so imagine people looking to buy a car being able to see actual real-life fuel efficiency figures for the models of car they are interested in?

I don’t know how far they are from having a database big enough to be able to produce figures with a reasonable degree of statistical reliability, but it’ll be interesting when they do.

Something Luis Suarez said on Twitter last week got me thinking. I tweeted back at the time, but thought the idea was worth fleshing out.

We need a Twitter glossary. My tweets stand a chance of making sense to people who know me, or have been following me for a while, but to anyone else? Perhaps not. But with only 140 characters, I haven’t got the space to put everything in context in every tweet.

What I want is an up-front way of defining a list of terms that I am likely to use often in the future. For each term, I could give a definition – a description that could be used in a tool-tip when you hover over the word in a tweet, and/or a URL to a page with more info if you click on it.

For example, instead of a tweet like:

Gotta take Grace with me to a SYA meeting tonight

it might be useful if the tweet showed up on the twitter webpage like this:

Gotta take Grace with me to a SYA meeting tonight

Yesterday, Andy sent me an invite (btw – thanks, Andy!) for dopplr – another online service where you can see online where someone is at any given time.

I’ve mentioned before that I have tried stuff like Plazes, as well as trying out my own approach (which you can see in the right-hand column of this blog’s front page, or by going straight here). Dopplr is still a closed beta though, so I hadn’t had the chance to try it before.

So far, I quite like it – it adds a couple of interesting points…
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