If there's one thing that the British like to do, it's talk about the weather. Take that fascination, add in social networks, and let the geeks go crazy with API's and hashtags, and you get UK Snow, a graphical application that charts snowfall around the UK from people using the hashtag #uksnow on Twitter.

The principle is simple, when snow falls in your area, people rate the snowfall on Twitter out of ten, add their postcode, and finish it with the hashtag #uksnow. These are collated live by the application, and presented to you both as a stream of texts and a graphical map of the UK.

There's no weather forecasting on offer here, and it's very unscientific, but it's a wonderful user generated snapshot of the state of the country. And you can spend weeks watching it before realising that it snows everywhere but Leith this winter.

UKSnow can be found in the Windows Store, or via our App Directory. And if you need to check the service from your deskbound computer, head to www.uksnowmap.com.