Tweeting in Westmont is no longer just for the birds.

In an effort to provide better service, the village has found a way to keep residents and businesses informed 24 hours a day through two popular electronic messaging services.

Village officials announced last week they will begin using two Internet services, Nixie and Twitter, to provide better communication on what is going on.

Both the Westmont Police Department and the village will provide information to Nixie, which will offer neigborhood-level public safety and community event notifications that can be sent instantly to residents and employees at local businesses, said Glen Liljeberg, Westmont’s information technology manager.

Residents can register for the service on Westmont’s Web site at www.Westmont.il.gov. Nixie is a free service, but standard text message rates apply to users who would receive notifications in that manner.

As far as what kind of alerts will be put on the service, village media coordinator Larry McIntyre said the program is now going through a test run to see how well it goes. In a few weeks, the village will start soliciting feedback from users about how the system works for them, he said.

“Once we get past that, we can start to really get the word out to people about the service and what we will post on it,” McIntyre said.

Liljeberg said Nixie is service used primary by corporations to communicate with their workers. The service now provides free access for government entities.

“It’s a very useful service, and it doesn’t cost us a thing to use it,” he said.

He said the village has seen several other communities using this technology to give the public additional avenues for receiving important village information in a timely basis.

“It also is good because someone who is on the service may be able to tell someone else about something they have seen on there,” he said. “A person who finds out about the car show on the service could tell someone else, and tell his friends about the event, and so on.”

In addition to the Nixie service, the village has opened a Twitter account. All information on Nixie automatically gets posted on Twitter.

Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read each others’ updates, known as tweets. These are text-based posts that can be sent and received via the Twitter Web site, Short Message Service or external applications.

“It helps having the two services working together, because Nixie automatically posts to Twitter, and we don’t have to worry about has this item been tweeted or not,” Liljeberg said.

The new service is part of the village’s mission to communicate and keep open government as much as possible. Staffers recently started putting video of town meetings online, and the village has offered audio podcast service for quite some time, Liljeberg said.