At some point last week I spotted a tweet that looked something like @beerspotr pint:butcombegold**** and wondered what was going on but I didn’t think much about it again til today when I remembered and decided to take a look again.

I’m glad I did as BeerSpotr is a fun idea – it is basically a Twitter syntax for reviewing beers/pubs/breweries and is alot more useful than all that slashtags stuff that Chris Messina was writing about – I mean I might actually use this!

The real fun is in the ‘Advanced BeerSpotr’ section and I can imagine with a bit of promotion this could really take off – especially in my little corner of Twitterdom which has more than its share of ale drinkers. I think it could get a bit of play at Dev8D next week and I’ll certainly start using it when I get back on the beer next week.

This is exactly the sort of thing I should have done with my ‘Quickpint’ idea when I realised I needed to scale back from my initial concept and I did look at building a beer & pub review site around the #qp tag but didn’t follow though and to be honest this is better. I still think something like this plus some additional editorial stuff could blow something like Beer in the Evening out of the water and would certainly drag CAMRA into the digital age.

Amusingly BeerSpotr seems to be a bit of a BBC production – well at least it was built by a couple of Beeb employees @fantasticlife and @neilbramah and is hosted on the ‘unofficial’ Backstage site. One of them also has a nice turn of phrase as well – not only do they use the ‘social drinking for anti-social people’ line but also the equally amusing ‘like Dopplr for drunks’…

If I had time I would get some Moo cards printed with the instructions to hand out next week and at future events!