Every once in a while a great idea comes along that, once you hear it, is so obvious!
On Aug 31, 2011 a British man named Alwyn Collinson started a 6 year project that uses Twitter to send out messages from World War II. These messages are reports of the war as they happen on the same day and time over 70 years ago. The messages are brief and often have links to related historical images.
@RealTimeWWII has grown in popularity over the months and as of the time of this writing has 160,000 users following the action.
As you can imagine there’s a lot of information to be relayed and the timing of the messages are what makes this so unique. Mr. Collinson uses an online scheduling tool called SocialOomph to keep the entire project moving.
I first learned about this project from an article in the New York Times. They have a great writeup that also talks about other similar projects.
If you’re a WWII fan you should check this out. An RSS feed is also available but requires a Facebook account to access.