twopointouch

It’s a great idea even for those of us in SoCal — but for the freeways!

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.

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!