Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies

http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/comment.html?entrynum=2143

by kapkapkap • 14 years ago

117 101 14 years ago

wensing11• 14 years ago

This is interesting. I think it's a good fit from a business model perspective (both are ad-driven, albeit TWC more so), but the fan bases are very different. The geeks at Wunderground are already crying foul ("YOU ARE GOING TO DESTROY WXUG!") and the typical fan of The Weather Channel is probably wondering why everyone is talking about weather happening underground all of a sudden. Also, Wundergrounders trust the lack of hype/sensationalism from Wunderground, but the same is never said about TWC.

Does anyone want to venture a guess as to why TWC would bother to acquire Wunderground?

emeraldd• 14 years ago

You're echoing my thoughts exactly. The first thing that came to mind with this headline was 'Well, about the only weather site I care about.'

ben1040• 14 years ago

>the typical fan of The Weather Channel is probably wondering why everyone is talking about weather happening underground all of a sudden.

Or radical leftists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

zevyoura• 14 years ago

It's worth noting that's not coincidental: both came out of the University of Michigan.

davidw• 14 years ago

I remember turning on the weather channel in high school, and the person would always stand in front of the west coast, blather on about the east coast at length, and then dedicate a few seconds to the west: "it's going to be sunny in most of California (no kidding), with massive snowstorms in eastern Washington which may or may not isolate the entire state, now back to you Bob".

wensing11• 14 years ago

Up until 1992 the weathermen would still stand in front of the hurricane while blathering on about rainstorms in the midwest. Then Andrew happened and that changed everything.

joezydeco• 14 years ago

If I was TWC, I'd use the network of private weather stations all feeding into WXUG to create hyper-local forecasts or even a mobile app that can push-alert you on the ETA of upcoming storms.

graupel• 14 years ago

What I've heard is that under (relatively new) ownership - meaning Comcast/NBC, there is a new push to expand revenue, and since weather.com already 'owns' the mass market, the only way to do that is to acquire, and will be to acquire more, revenue generating properties.

karlshea4• 14 years ago

I definitely hope that the site continues on as it is, I love the sheer amount of data that's available.

maxerickson• 14 years ago

Weather.gov also does a nice job.

They even have modern stuff like short urls:

http://weather.gov/20500

mhurron3• 14 years ago

The only thing they're missing is something like Weather Undergrounds easy radar map.

That provided XML for the forecast might come in handy for something I was going to do though.

brownbat• 14 years ago

There's an opportunity out there for someone to make a weather site with a stripped down interface.

ReadEvalPost• 14 years ago

I've a feeling Joel Spolsky's comment on the 80/20 rule applies to weather sites: "80% of the people use 20% of the features. [...] Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%."

jonknee2• 14 years ago

With weather it should be pretty simple. Temp and odds of precipitation are the two biggies. Have nice radar/sat images/loops easily accessible. Put the other stuff farther down.

wensing11• 14 years ago

That's exactly what we've attempted to do / have done with Stormpulse.

gergles• 14 years ago

$280 a year is an absolute joke for a weather site for an individual user.

dr42• 14 years ago

isn't that google? q=weather 94107

jonstjohn4• 14 years ago

I run my own niche weather site http://www.climbingweather.com that focuses on weather for climbing areas in the United States. It's not full-featured like Weather Underground, but I've often wondered if it would be worth my time to generalize it for a larger audience. This story somewhat inspires me to give it a shot.

wensing11• 14 years ago

If you ever want to talk about bootstrapping a weather startup, shoot me a line.

porterhaney• 14 years ago

Both of you gents are doing some neat things with the weather. We also do some ski centric forecasting @ http://www.famousinternetskiers.com/weather/

mikegreenberg• 14 years ago

I can vouch for Matt being the real deal. He's successfully been working on Stormpulse in South Florida for the past several years and he's a super helpful guy to know (in the world of weather or not).

jonstjohn4• 14 years ago

Definitely. I think I may have met you at PyCon last year(?).

billeh• 14 years ago

I hope they carry over the WunderMap. Of all the radars I've browsed, theirs is definitely the quickest, and has all sorts of layers to customize it with. (As well as a multitude of station readings.)

It looks like they'll be keeping the Wunderground site as-is, but I've learned from past experiences that those kinds of statements don't hold up too well down the road ..

jrockway• 14 years ago

That's too bad. I always liked the raw radar imagery. (OK, not really raw, but the same images that real forecasters get.) The Weather Channel is too mainstream; all their imagery is editorialized and dumbed down for an audience that just wants to know if it's going to rain today.

I guess I will have to write a quick perl script to generate my own images now.

mistercow• 14 years ago

>The Weather Channel is too mainstream; all their imagery is editorialized and dumbed down for an audience that just wants to know if it's going to rain today.

Not to mention that their forecasts are presented in a way that is statistically incoherent. Look at their hourly forecasts, then click to break down by 15 minute intervals. It is common to see things like "rain during 2:00-3:00 = 30%", and then also have something like 50% during one of the 15 minute intervals within that time range. I have yet to come up with a hypothesis for what those percentages could mean, and have that scenario be possible.

mertd• 14 years ago

Purely speculating, but it may be the expected duration of rain. So 30% in one hour means on the average it will rain 18 minutes within that hour and 50% of 15 mins would be 7.5 rainy minutes.

My real guess is that they have independent models for different time resolutions.

wtvanhest3• 14 years ago

30% chance of rain actually means 30% of the area is projected to have rain covering it rather than there being a 30% chance you will be rained on.

An unlikely, but theoretically possible way to get 50% inside of 15 minute interval but 20% over an hour would be if the model prodicted very widespread rain in a band moving over an area and time weighted the percentage.

nalsh• 14 years ago

My understanding is that this would mean that ~30% of the computer models predict rain between 2:00-3:00. I doubt they would stake everything on a singular model, but I could be wrong.

larrywright• 14 years ago

If you're an OS X or iOS user, check out RadarScope: http://www.basevelocity.com/RadarScope/ - it's a prosumer weather radar app, and it's got what you're looking for. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy user.

mauchter• 14 years ago

You might be interested in http://lug.rose-hulman.edu/proj/aweather

mkramlich• 14 years ago

> I guess I will have to write a quick perl script to generate my own images now.

a few years from now: sells to Facebook for $1B ;)

pgrote• 14 years ago

Wow. I am crestfallen. Loved the service for years and have been a paying member for a while.

Weather underground did a great job of making historical and trending weather information available. They do a great job of supporting local weather blogs, too.

I wonder how long until the "integration" occurs and it is just a memory.

wglb• 14 years ago

Well, after trying out stormpulse, wunderground seems kind of, well, less interesting.

wensing11• 14 years ago

Well, thanks! :)

cs702• 14 years ago

According to the announcement, the acquisition will "make both wunderground.com and weather.com stronger," so Wunderground fans have nothing to worry about. Right? :-(

RedwoodCity• 14 years ago

Nooh, now only big weather will tell us our meteorological future. First ObamaCare and now this. This country has lost its way.

droithomme• 14 years ago

That is really unfortunate. Weather Underground actually has the weather, the Weather Channel on the other hand is just crap.

Obviously this is another "acquisition" that is intended solely and transparently at eliminating an agile competitor who makes a better product.

wensing11• 14 years ago

I don't think Weather Channel was threatened by Wunderground's market share. A more plausible explanation I've heard is to reduce competition for advertisers in the weather space.

ihsw• 14 years ago

But competition is good.

wahsd• 14 years ago

weatherspark.com That will surly suit your fancy

rhizome2• 14 years ago

Your sentences would appear to contradict each other.

tubbo• 14 years ago

This statement is total bullshit. Weather Underground doesn't have better data or coverage than the Weather Channel. If you're really looking for more coverage, check out the weather blogs.

karlshea4• 14 years ago

They do have a huge network of personal weather stations that the Weather Channel doesn't have. It's mentioned in the blog post that the Weather Channel was going to start incorporating that data on weather.com.

jberryman• 14 years ago

I don't know... I think I'm "and nothing of value was lost" on this one. Weather underground is spammy and terrible just like all the others.

Anyone know if there is a http://time.is for weather? Or someplace where I can easily see weather conditions on a driving route? Really just anyplace that has thought for more than half a second about the kind of weather info people want and how to present it? I mean this is simple shit.

brittohalloran• 14 years ago

weatherspark.com ROCKS (no affiliation)

You can customize how you want the data and then bookmark a link to that exact configuration. The two pieces of data that I want are the radar and temperature vs time graph (which not every app has). Here's my link as an example:

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/IL/Crystal_Lake;dt...

s-phi-nl• 14 years ago

For something dead simple, there's http://goingtorain.com/

JakeSc• 14 years ago

http://thefuckingweather.com/

smcguinness• 14 years ago

http://www.intellicast.com/ is my go to weather app.

rbritton• 14 years ago

In the US we use weather.gov. They provide data streams as well for anyone looking to develop something custom.

kingnothing• 14 years ago

I wonder how long it will be before they kill off http://classic.wunderground.com. What's the next best source for weather?

vl• 14 years ago

Yes, I'm worried as well.

Wundermap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/) is literally the only functional weather map on the internet.

I used it to find a spot to drive to to see Venus transit because everything in the vicinity was covered with clouds. I don't how I would be able to accomplish this without wundermap. I would be extremely sad to see it go.

natex• 14 years ago

For those looking for an alternative: http://weatherspark.com/#

wensing11• 14 years ago

Definitely a win for those guys if they carpe diem.

lukev• 14 years ago

Indeed. To the scientifically-minded, I find their graph-based model many times easier to read and more thorough than any other source, wunderground included.

sxcurry• 14 years ago

As a PWS (Personal Weather Station) contributor (KORTALEN1) to wunderground for many years, this concerns me. I live in Rural Oregon and the local PWS's provide a much needed micro look at local weather. Plus, I rely on wunderground's great radar presentation and access to the local Scientific Forecaster discussion. I worry that this kind of detailed scientific data and analysis will start to be lost in the inevitable dumbing down that will come.

superuser2• 14 years ago

Wunderground just repackages National Weather Service data. If you can forgive the 90s design, weather.gov is perfect.

audiodude• 14 years ago

I'm a huge fan of weather.gov, mostly because I know it's my taxpayer dollars.

abrowne2• 14 years ago

Just replaced today* with a new design: http://weather.gov/redesign

* After being in preview for a while.

AmazingBytecode• 14 years ago

I can't believe they sold out, I thought they were underground!

yellowbkpk• 14 years ago

I imagine they bought wunderground for the Personal Weather Stations. They have thousands of people sending them data in real time from their personal weather stations.

I bet if someone were to quickly make an equivalent API that collected all this data from these users and presented it in a similar fashion, they'd draw a lot of those PWS contributors away from NBC/Weather Channel.

tmzt• 14 years ago

Didn't this happen with Escient CDDB and FreeDB? You can't assume the community will keep providing you data when there's a plug-in replacement.

c0nsumer• 14 years ago

I understand the lament over wunderground.com being sold, but have any of you checked out what the National Weather Service offers? It's been my go-to site for years, is pretty spot on, has no-nonsense text based emergency notifications, makes it easy to hop over to hydrographic data, and a bunch of other things.

Today I just happened across this prediction format which is about all I could hope for as well:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.62840&lo...

karlshea4• 14 years ago

That's pretty awesome. My-Cast for iOS presents something similar when you're in landscape mode.

bburky• 14 years ago

Wow. That's great. I may use that from now on.

Graphs are much more convenient for answering "when today will it probably rain"? And all the other graphs provide really nice context.

runn1ng3• 14 years ago

On the topic of weather sites: I really prefer http://yr.no website lately. (Don't be fooled by .no, it's based in Norway, but they cover the whole world)

My inner geek likes the most the hour-by-hour weather graphs: http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/hour_by_... - and the statistics page - http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/statisti...

babs474• 14 years ago

Check this site out: http://www.my-cast.com/#California

Pannable, Zoomable animated radar and satellite cloud map.

I think it's the best site for monitoring severe weather.

runn1ng3• 14 years ago

It seems US-based and the temperatures are in Fahrenheit, while I am from Europe and prefer Celsius :)

abrowne2• 14 years ago

When I found Yr.no a few months ago I liked it, but it only is a forecast -- at least for a US location -- and I need current conditions as well!

runn1ng3• 14 years ago

Oh, that's true, I haven't actully noticed it.

telecuda• 14 years ago

The Weather Channel has been going through a lot of restructuring and making big improvements over the past 3 years. Knowing Jeff Masters and his passion for the Weather Underground format, I do believe this has more to do with The WxChannel leveraging Wunderground.com's treasure trove of data, including personal weather stations. Also, Jeff's Tropical Update blogs and others truly are are high-quality content that will help the general public's (weather.com's audience) understanding of severe storms. Weather Underground was kind enough to point its users to our recently-retired http://www.onestorm.org/ for hurricane planning.

jlarocco• 14 years ago

Can anybody explain what Wunderground and TWC offer above the NWS? They're both just calling the NWS API and wrapping it in ads, right? Do either of them do any kind of additional analysis or processing to make the forecasts more accurate? The few times I've checked they're always been mirroring the weather.gov data. The government is known for being clunky, but I've always thought they did a pretty good job here [1], though I did like their old layout a little better.

[1] http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=40.01498...

reidmain• 14 years ago

Weather Underground did gather data from a variety of sources (http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/index.asp) and displayed more fine grain results that the "regular" person who cares about weather would never look at.

I have Weather Underground, The Weather Network and the default Apple Weather app (which pulls from Yahoo I believe) and I always found Weather Underground to be more accurate on both a large scale and in their hourly reports.

laconian• 14 years ago

Oh shit. Good for Wunderground, bad for me. I can't stand weather.com

bradleyland• 14 years ago

I hope they keep the ad-free subscription model. I've been a paying member for years. Browsing weather ad-free is such a relief.

_wp3r• 14 years ago

Greatest feature of wunder is access to local station streams like this

http://weather.barryt.org/wdl/index.html http://weather.barryt.org/

Just some guy that loves weather.

jlgreco• 14 years ago

I really hope they keep the wunderground telnet server running. I find that thing invaluable.

ikawe• 14 years ago

wow: If you're using HTTPS Everywhere please disable it for GoogleMaps since it makes the authorization request fail. Tools Menu -> Add Ons -> Extensions -> HTTPS Everywhere -> Options -> Search for 'GoogleMaps' -> Click on the green check mark to turn it into a red x.

It's too bad I can't use their service with HTTPS everywhere, but awesome that it's a user experience they considered.

hudibras• 14 years ago

It's interesting to compare the almost-unanimous condemnation of this sale with that of other HN articles about acquisitions. Not even one 'attaboy, Jeff' comment for the founder cashing out?

I wonder what the response would have been if the buyer was Google, not TWC.

weatherfan• 14 years ago

weather channel bought weatherbonk.com a few years ago, then shut it down. hope this doesn't happen to wunderground.

Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies

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