Commuter Feed - Twitter Traffic Tool

By Erica M
February 14th, 2008 @ 8:52 PM Driving, Media, Transportation

If you don’t like Twitter, stop reading now.

…

commuterfeed.pngOkay, now that it’s just us, let me tell you about Commuter Feed.

You know all those traffic tweets you send when you have time to text because you’re parked on the highway? Send them to Commuter Feed over Twitter and it’ll aggregate everything for the metro. Five easy steps:

  1. Sign up for Twitter.
  2. Follow @commuter. Note: Any tweet that starts with “@commuter” will be public, even if you’re private, so folks can actually use the info..
  3. Determine your city code, which is your nearest airport code. (MSP, duh.)
  4. Send your traffic tweets in the following format: “@commuter MSP traffic message here”. That’s @commuter[space]MSP[space]incident. Syntax is important. Then be patient; it takes a few minutes for tweets to show up in the feed. It appears to only accept about 70 characters worth of incident report.
  5. Read the Feed.

Now what would be sweet would be a Google Maps/Traffic mashup, so tweets appear from the location of the reported incident. Maybe someone out there tweeting knows why that one section of 35E is red. That might take some more complex geotagging mixed in with Twitter.

Since this is the question that always comes up, I know I know I know that this is more entertaining than useful. Takes some critical mass to see worthwhile results, though, so if you’re on Twitter, try it out.

(While you’re at it feel free to follow me.)

Related posts:

  1. Gawker Traffic on 494 This Morning
  2. @MinneapolisMN - The City Twitter
  3. The Current on Twitter
  4. Minnesota Public Radio vs Twitter Account Squatter
  5. Traffic Maps n’ Cams

4 Comments so far

  1. Greg (unregistered) on February 14th, 2008 @ 9:39 pm

    Okay, I’m trying it tomorrow. But I don’t understand how I get the updates from other MSP tweets whilst sitting in my car on 494.

  2. Erica M (unregistered) on February 14th, 2008 @ 9:44 pm

    I don’t understand how I get the updates from other MSP tweets whilst sitting in my car on 494

    That’s where I’m a little stuck. But I figured if folks can be bothered while driving to dig up a Google Map (not that it’s that hard) (with traffic, even), they can click through to the MSP page easily enough if they’ve bookmarked it.

  3. Erica M (unregistered) on February 15th, 2008 @ 8:05 am

    It would be really helpful if they would report the time in the local time instead of GMT/UTC/whatever. It loses whatever small amount of usefulness it might have if I can’t quickly tell when the reports came in.

  4. Erica M (unregistered) on February 15th, 2008 @ 1:51 pm

    Okay, now I’m annoyed that the RSS feed keeps refreshing with the same three tweets on it. It’s old news now, guys.


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