Twitter, the online 'microblogging' service, has been going through something of a rough time lately.
Under fire from columnists (including several of my colleagues at the Standard) for being pointless, it has also had to deal with the arrival of celebrity madness since Jonathan Ross signed up, and persuaded many of his celebrity friends such as Russell Brand to join him.
For regular users of the service (myself included), this has proved something of a problem.
Rather like the point where your parents join Facebook, the arrival of the celebrity masses does seem a good time to bail out and find the next big thing. It's now impossible to log on without seeing messages from dozens of previously sensible and intersting contacts who are now convinced they are actually best friends with Stephen Fry or 'Wossy', as he is know online.
However, one thing this week has gone some way to redeeming twitter, and it was the snow.
As London descended into tube and travel chaos, Twitter was well ahead of the game, and more importantly providing an incredibly useful service to users.
One enterprising user set up a live online map tracking snowfall. By updating their account with their postcode and the amount of snow falling, users could contribute, and it gave an amazing indication of exactly what the weather was doing. By viewing the map, it was possible to see exactly where snow was falling at any time, and how heavily.
Most importantly, it proved that while a lot of twitter is about what C list celebs had for breakfast, it has also blossomed into a useful, simple communication tool which can be incredibly useful.
And while the general banal day to day chat may yet strangle the service before it has really become mass market, uksnow has shown that it's not a lost battle yet. And for the moment, I'm sticking with it to see what happens.