Great piece of innovative work by Vodafone UK utilising the power of twitter and Google maps.
In order to promote Vodacom’s scrapping of European roaming charges (i.e. make calls in most European countries for the same cost as back home), Vodacom have released a website where people can tweet their summer holiday plans. The tweets will show up and aggregate on a customised Vodacom Google map page (as shown above).
To participate all that people need to do is tweet the hashtag #ukhols, your age, sex, the first half of your postcode and where you are going this year (e.g. #ukhols 25 F B12 Gran Canaria).
If you don’t want to give your age and sex, just tweet the hashtag #ukhols, the first half of your postcode, and your destination (e.g. #ukhols NW11 Ibiza).
The tweets only take a few minutes to show up on the map and there is also a live twitter stream of people using the #ukhols hashtag.
Great work and will be interesting to see how popular it becomes, early signs look good. The site was developed by Ben Marsh (you can contact him here), and it uses the Twitter Search API, the Google Maps API, the Yahoo Placemaker API and a large helping of jQuery.
To take a look for yourself go visit www.ukholsmap.com.