The Victoria Line is not only the noisiest and grubbiest London Underground line; it is also my latest Twitter friend. In what may be the first known example of someone making Twitter, the ‘Seinfeld of the Internet’, do something useful, philosophy student and all-round clever chap Tom Morris has created travel update channels for each of the Underground lines feeding from Transport for London’s own updates. There are also RSS and Atom feeds for each. Since Twitter messages can be relayed to your mobile phone as SMS messages, this makes for a clever way to get personalised travel updates while you’re out and about.
It’s probably a good idea to start a new Twitter account if you are going to make use of this — if you’ve already got plenty of friends, you’ll find your phone filled with the usual trivia in moments otherwise.
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It’s a great idea even for those of us in SoCal — but for the freeways! :)
I didn’t mention it, but Tom has also created a feed and account for the SF BART system. Just a couple of posts later than the one I’ve linked to.
Wrong analolgy on my part! We have a mass transit in LA. It’s the Metro and the wonderful bus system! But, this is something that could definitely work here such that freeway-ites like me would actually take mass transit if I knew when buses were actually going to arrive.
I still havn’t quite understood the logic behind the twitter obsession which is sweeping a small part of the internet. TFL provide a free of charge service which will send this information to mobiles/email anyway. However its useful to have it as RSS as well.
I think the TfL SMS service costs money. The explanation on its site isn’t entirely clear:
“TfL does not charge you for providing the Service. Mobile operators charge TfL for every SMS message that is sent so we cover the cost. However your mobile operator may charge you for receiving Travel Alerts, for example when roaming with your phone overseas, or for certain ?pay as you go? tariffs. If you are unsure how much you may be paying to receive SMS messages from TfL, please ask your network provider.”
The TFL service itself is free but as you rightly point out, network operators may charge. Twitter is in the same situation:
“with phone alerts turned on, Twitter makes use of texting or SMS so check with your mobile provider to find out if this will cost you extra”
Each to their own, I just find the entire thing slightly bizarre! :-)
The reason I used Twitter rather than just staying with the TFL service is two-fold:
When I started commuting to London, I signed up for the TFL service and haven’t gotten a single message from them. I’ve tried once or twice and not gotten anything.
Secondly, with Twitter, it’s a lot easier to control permissions of who is and who isn’t allowed to contact you. Once you have, for instance, befriended the Victoria Line, if you decide that you don’t want to hear it’s many creaky problems, you go on to the Twitter website and hit ‘remove’. If you just want to stop getting texts, you just tell Twitter to be quiet.
As both myself and others build more automated services that use Twitter as a delivery mechanism, it’s value will become clearer — instead of having to keep track of nine different organisations using your phone number or IM details, you can just track one company — Twitter.
Thanks for the link and discussions, folks.
I must admit I also don’t get why I want an ocean of trivia from twitter*, interesting therefore that here twitter is functioning as a de facto aggregator — I assume because the de jure one doesn’t work properly?
* those people that do must have a lot of time on their hands I suspect
I too am fascinated by the whole Twitter thing, because I don’t really get it either. How much information overload can people take? But Tube 2.o is more useful than reading what my friend Matthew had for lunch. The Twitter tail may end up wagging the Twitter dog: updates from systems may end up taking over from updates from people.
Speaking of information overload, I’ve now grouped the blogs I read into three tiers. Only the top tier do I strive to stay on top of. Which explains how I’m back to being current with twopointouch, which I haven’t been for months!