Commuter Feed-Twitter as a Platform
Twitter as a platform is one of my favorite things to consider. Why? Because what Twitter has created has spawned so many interesting, sometimes useful, and always creative extensions. In this case, Christopher S. Penn and Dave Fleet both shared an item in my feed reader from Biz Stone off the Twitter blog pointing this out. So, uh, hat tips all around.
Commuter Feed has a Twitter account named Commuter. Twitter users can send @ messages to Commuter, and with the right formatting, these will go to the appropriate commuter page.
Syntax: @commuter(space)airport designation(space)message.
Okay, it’s a little tricky, and not all areas are covered yet (It’s US-centric, but hey, go model it for your traffic coverage in Singapore and India!), but I think it’s a neat way to see how Twitter can be used.
As some of you know, my typical commute is nearly 2 hours one way on congested days, so you can rest assured that I’ll be contributing to the Boston traffic reports for outside of the city.
What do you think? What’s your favorite use of Twitter as a platform? Are you part of Club140? Do you send news to the Truemors Twitter News Network by way of @truemors? What do you think of Twitter as a platform?
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Comments
Even though I’ve been “using” Twitter for awhile now, it’s only recently that I’ve started to pursue it as an option for other things. I always found it to be a bit banal, but that was only because I couldn’t see the bigger picture beyond all the posts of people twittering about what they ate for breakfast.
Now I’m using it as a promotional tool, mostly experimental at this point, and I’m hoping it generates a tiny bit of buzz for my site, but even if it doesn’t bring the hangers-on in droves, it takes so little of my time to manage, it’s worth it.
So, using that as a stepping stone to the bigger picture, I can say that Twitter as a platform is definitely a possibility for certain types of users. The traffic idea is cool as long as you are able to follow only the areas you need rather than all. I’m not sure I would use it myself, but that’s because I have one way in and one way out to work each day.
Long winded answer to basically say, “Sure, it coudl work.”
This service is amazing. I found it yesterday, from Biz Stone’s tweet. At that time there was only 1 tweet for Toronto, now there are 9.
In fact, one of the 9 ( http://twitter.com/cglynne/statuses/709378362 ) is about 3 minutes from my house (in regular traffic, of course). Amazing.
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I travel all over the metro Boston area so I will certainly keep my eye on (and contribute to) Commuter Feed.
Easy tip:
Setup a canned sms message that starts:
@commuter(space)citycode(space)
Then type your alert when you pull up the canned message