The power of crowds is being harnessed in all sorts of ways nowadays, from shopping coupons to funding dodgy projects, and driving is no exception. The most famous community service in this regard is Waze, which provides a publicly curated GPS navigation system to help get the most out of your drive, but now there’s another example which is almost as interesting.

Twitraffic uses the power of Twitter to deliver real time notifications of traffic delays and problems on the road directly to your smartphone. The app, which is available on both iPhone and Android, culls the Twitter firehose and pulls the public tweets which highlight traffic problems into a route planner.

The result is a rolling traffic summary of traffic incidents which fires off an alert to your phone immediately anything is detected. The system also monitors the road agencies to ensure that the tweets match to their data as well, although we’d be surprised if the highways agencies would be as fast to update as a disgruntled driver stuck behind a truck spill.

The system is UK only at the moment, and is currently on offer for free until this Saturday, after which it will be priced at £1.49. Grab it while you can on iPhone and Android.