Power of Twitter

There was a tweet posted earlier about Caltrain Chief Operating Officer learning about the “accident” at the CAC meeting. I was actually the one who told him about that. When I announced the incident, they were asking whether it was about the incident the night before, but I confirmed that the incident I was talking about was happening right in the moment.

Earlier in the day, I made a small app with Yahoo Pipes to pull the information off Twitter and show it on transitunlimited.org. Because I don’t use IPhones or Blackberries, I check the wiki see what’s going on. I use Yahoo Pipes to basically limit tweets to those that were made within two hours (anything past that are not useful).

When the Chief Operating Officer Chuck Harvey came to our CAC meeting, he was delivering a grim news about SamTrans’s $30 million deficit and the possibility of cutting bus service by 15%. While we were discussing the topic, I was checking the wiki for information on routes that could be eliminated, but I when I check the front page, I found all the tweets about that incident, and that’s when I made the announcement.

The front page also shows service announcement for BART and other operators. BART has its own RSS feed and other transit operators rely on emails, which are converted into a RSS feed.

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