[MicahWedemeyer]

I agree that it's unfair to say "so-and-so already does X", since innovating often just takes the form of making something slightly less crappy than it was before.

Unfortunately, my experience with Twitter, and especially automated Twitbots, is that Twitter is the crappy experience that needs to be improved upon. People push data into it because it's easy to do, not because it adds any real value.

Let's take the weather example: Auto-tweeting weather vanes are too noisy to include in your normal stream, so you unfollow them. Then, if you do want that information you have to use a search client, or build some kind of special client/consumer that compiles that info for you. At that point, surely it's easier to use one of the other services. Getting the data out of Twitter in a usable fashion is simply more work than getting it otherwise.