

Ask YC: A twitter idea - any thoughts? - dangoldin

I had a twitter idea this morning while on the subway and decided run with it. Let me know if this makes sense to anyone.<p>While I was waiting for the subway, I wished there was an easy way to determine where the train was, this way I could time when I left for work or take a different route. I thought that maybe twitter can help in solving this problem.<p>If people were waiting on the subway and twitted every time a train went by or they got on the train, it would be pretty easy to set up a system to combine these tweets and create a "train network."<p>Now if there was some general way to aggregate this data one would be able to create real time systems for almost anything that has a time/location variable. You can potentially use this to track traffic on roads as well as some other more general things I haven't really thought of yet so if anyone has any ideas, respond.<p>The difficulty lies in getting people to send the twitter messages but if it's an overall social good maybe they will. Another one is standardizing the responses so they are easy to translate into data. There must also be a mechanism to avoid fake tweets that are just there to screw the data but given enough correct responses and a way to ban, it should be easy to handle.<p>Disclaimer (probably a big one): I don't use twitter but in the case of a societal good I may start - once I get a smart phone.
======
specialkevin
There are sites that do this for traffic and such already,
<http://commuterfeed.com/>. Also if you wanted to do this for the subway you
could just create a hashtag for your rail system. Then when ever they see a
train tweet #<hashtag> train just left <station>. This would only require
getting the community behind you since the infrastructure is in place. You
could then use Summize to track the hashtag and populate a website so not
twitter users could use it.

------
tstegart
You might want to wait until there is internet access underground in subway
stations before spending some time on this. Not to be Debbie Downer like or
anything.

~~~
dangoldin
Haha yep. This is more an exercise of thinking what's possible although I
think some networks do have access in the NYC subway system.

In any case, you can scale it to non-subway and see what you get.

I wish I had the time to pursue this but I'm busy with a couple of other
things so this just gets added on to my ever increasing to do list.

