It rained on Lanzarote yesterday.  How do I know?  No, I did not visit an online weather site.  Instead I simply followed the word “Lanzarote” on Twitter.

Reading Twitter can either be timeconsuming or fascinating, depending on who and what you read.  So in the past few days I have been watching out for tweets that contain the word “Lanzarote”.  (You can see the current tweets by using the Twitter search).

Every day there have been people, mainly in the UK, writing about their forthcoming holiday to Lanzarote, many of them announcing their day of departure.  Others are already on holiday, presumably tweeting from their mobile phones.

Then there are the residents (eg. users juliecj, themadcatlady and lanzarote), who tweet about their lives on the island.

Using this source in the past few days alone, I have discovered Nick Ball’s article on Travelaholic Anonymous and an assortment of pictures posted on TwitPic of Papagayo beach, the airport, and even a local menu.

I am also trying out a tool called “TweetDeck”, where you can follow keywords instead of people.  This way, I see the tweets from anyone writing about the island, even if I haven’t followed them in the past.

So whilst I may not always want to know what people had for breakfast, there are some interesting facts and photos to be found.  Search for yourself and see!