Weather website sold

continued

Some staffers were in shock after the announcement. Shaun Tanner--an eight-year employee whose skills, like those of many others at WU, combine meteorology and computer programming--blogged that "it felt as if something was being taken from me." The company's culture valued thinking outside the box: "No idea was too crazy for the Weather Underground," Tanner writes. But he adds that many good ideas fell by the wayside for lack of resources to implement them; now, that will change.

Masters says weather.com gets about three times as many visitors as WU, and he's already thinking about ways to leverage that bigger audience. Since many weather.com users submit local weather news via Twitter, he's looking at what it would take to post that information automatically to online maps.   

[Originally published in August, 2012.]