Hi all, Ian has been bugging me to delurk, so I thought I'd post something I put together the other day that should be interesting and/or useful for the Londoners on this list... http://blogs.opml.org/tommorris/2007/02/22#twitterTubeTracker
Basically, I've launched a little mashup which takes the Tube data, checks it every fifteen minutes and sends any errors to Twitter. You can then subscribe to a particular feed in Twitter and get updates to your Jabber account or phone. It also now means that I am collecting historical information about Tube performance. I have also just published another Twitter feed for the San Francisco BART network: http://twitter.com/bartsf There are a few problems - the key one being the length of each particular update. I'm probably going to write a script to shorten certain words, and perhaps to split up long updates in to two part updates. I'd also like to allow the "Web 2.0 user generated content" horde in, but I can't do that yet. I'm waiting for the folks at Twitter to improve their API and then I can start letting people generate their own transport delay information. I developed it because I wanted to scratch an itch - to know before I get to the Tube station whether the Circle line is running okay - and because I don't like premium rate text services where you pay like 50p to find out only a couple of bits (in the Shannon sense) of information. I'd like to do more public transport projects like this. If anyone knows of any public transport systems with XML/JSON/etc. data available about running status, please e-mail me as it takes me only a very short amount of time to do that kind of thing. Yours, -- Tom Morris http://blogs.opml.org/tommorris - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/backstage@lists.bbc.co.uk/
