Commuter Feed

[Ron (CF Admin)]

Hi Twitter Developers,
I've been emailing people individually for feedback on the app we
released a week or so ago, www.commuterfeed.com, but realized it would
be a lot easier to get feedback from the Twitter group. Commuter Feed
is a way to report on traffic and transit delays in your local area.

We actually have a logic problem I'd like to solve regarding the API,
so this isn't just spam, I promise.

Basically you follow @commuter, find your city code on our site (we
use IATA airport codes, so its typically the closest large airport)
and then post to @commuter (citycode) Report

We've gotten a lot of great feedback from tech blogs and our users,
but one thing that seems to bug everyone is that we don't post all the
reports back to Twitter.

We've been scratching our heads over this problem, as every solution
we can come up with involves creating a new Twitter account for each
city (we have hundreds in the database) and having people follow that
as well. Very complicated and not something we want to do.

I've started exploring direct messages, but that means we have to add
everyone as a friend. Is there an easy way to automate this?

Anybody have some clever solutions?

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!
Ron

Commuter Feed
http://www.commuterfeed.com

[Geoff Barnes]

Ron,

Does the problem pertain to not wanting the commuter user's stream to fill up with followers' non-@commuter tweets?  If so, it may be a similar logic conundrum to one we've got on a number of projects I'm working on, and we don't see an elegant solution.  What are the details of your challenge?

Geoff

--
Geoff Barnes

"Fortune favors the bold."  -Virgil

"Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive." -Sir Walter Scott

"Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it." -G.B. Shaw

[deali...@gmail.com]

> We've been scratching our heads over this problem, as every solution
> we can come up with involves creating a new Twitter account for each
> city (we have hundreds in the database) and having people follow that
> as well. Very complicated and not something we want to do.

I don't know if this completely solves the problem, but one way around
that is to have users just track their city code (seems unique enough
to not get from other sources, or you could prefix it somehow). It
pushes a "setup" task out to the user, but I for one wouldn't be
bothered one bit and tracking is a cool feature you might introduce
people to.

Aside: you could #hashtag the city codes as well and then we would be
able to see novel trending data over at hashtags.org

Aside 2: Your two bigger issues as I see it are critical mass
(requires a lot of "reporting" users to be useful as a "consumer") and
the danger/difficulty of texting-while-driving! :)