Using technology when your flight is canceled

Most carriers automatically notify travelers — at least those who have signed up for flight alerts by e-mail, text message or phone call, The New York Times reports. Those alerts, which many passengers fail to sign up for, combined with Twitter, can put you ahead of the pack.

Increasingly airlines, including JetBlue, Southwest and Delta, are using Twitter to notify passengers of major flight cancellations and assist in rebooking. Last year, Delta created a dedicated Twitter account for customer service issues, @DeltaAssist, with reservation agents online Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. Eastern time.

Because of the viral nature of Twitter, with Twitterers habitually “re-tweeting” one another’s posts, customers who reach out to the airline via Twitter may get a quicker response than they would by phone or another communications channel as airlines attempt to quell any negative publicity. 

Your own newspaper from Twitter

Using Twitter as a source of news? Like the look of an old-fashioned newspaper? A Swiss startup called Small Rivers has taken that idea and turned it into a service called Paper.li. Here's how it works:

The site takes your Twitter stream and extracts links to any news stories, photos, videos, etc., which it then analyzes using what the company calls “semantic text analysis tools” to determine whether the stories are relevant. It then displays the links and related content in sections based on the context of the link.

The service also creates themed pages based on specific topics using hashtags, such as #privacy or #climate, in much the same way that newspapers create special sections around an event or topic. Paper.li also automatically creates topical sections like Technology, Arts & Entertainment, Photos, Politics and Business. If you hover over the source of each link or photo, you can reply, retweet, follow or unfollow and favorite that user. Users can also now create papers using a Twitter list.

You can see several of these here, courtesy of Gigaom:

• Jeff Nolan (technology blogger and VC — @jeffnolan)
• Umair Haque (director of Harvard’s media lab — @umairh)
• Ross Mayfield (co-founder of Socialtext — @ross)
• Wired magazine (the Wired Daily account — @wired)
• Stowe Boyd (online consultant — @stoweboyd)
• Alex Howard (O’Reilly correspondent — @digiphile)

What’s interesting about using Twitter for such a service, Mathew Ingram notes, is that you don’t have to explicitly say which articles you like, or wait for the software to learn what you’re interested in; you choose the people you follow and those people choose the links they want to share, and that constitutes your newspaper.