Tech-savvy flock to Twitter for quicker ride

London: Next time you're in London and need a cab, you might like to try tweeting@tweetalondoncab for one.

Richard Cudlip, Karl James and a small circle of cabbies have spent the last year building up a black cab service on Twitter, and while Cudlip says they don't handle more jobs than in their street-hailing days, it's the data the service generates that is interesting.

There's now 100 cabbies using tweetalondoncab and nearly 7,000 followers . The drivers are self-employed and tweetalondoncab is a cooperative project.

The account acts as an aggregator for requests, and cabbies can also flag up their location. "We're getting more and more bookings, and the quality of bookings is better, with longer trips," said Cudlip.