Monday, February 11, 2008

Twitter traffic updates via commuterfeed.com...

commuterfeed.com
In an effort to try to show Twitter as useful, behold commuterfeed.com.

Commuterfeed.com is a website devoted to collecting updates about commutes from around the country. The site sets up some common guidelines for the Twitter community to use when alerting others of commuting congestion. Most importantly, find your region and use the correct format (e.g. @commuter (SPACE) citycode (SPACE) incident). Check the site for more detailed instructions.

It sounds like a great idea, for those of us sitting in front of our computers and checking our commutes before leaving.

I just wonder how I would use this to receive updates to my phone. Being a Palm OS user for the time being, I don't think I have many good Twitter client options. I know TwitterBerry is out there for you BlackBerry users (I've never used it).

Turning on updates to my phone from commuter would yield tweets from every area of the country.

Commuterfeed.com has an RSS feed for each region. But, then I see the only option as converting the RSS feed to e-mail. I've already discussed how not real time that would be.

Perhaps I am too greedy to want to see real-time traffic updates from the Twitter community about only my metro area, on my cell phone (I won't look at my phone while driving).

The website is still useful.

I guess the alternatives are that old fashioned thing called the radio or staring at traffic cameras online (in my opinion, not very helpful).

Can any Twitter users help me filter real-time messages to my phone? What am I missing?