What a morning, huh?  It is fortunate there was no loss of life this morning but it seemed to impact service just as bad if not more so.  I found it amusing that a day after I was talking to a friend about the service there was an incident where so many of the pros and cons were highlighted.  That said here are a few tips, reminders, and requests which will hopefully help to continue to make this service useful.

1) Check @caltrain before you send your tweet.

Don’t get me wrong here — everyone who is contributing rocks and I’ve been spared a long and painful commute many times because of everyone who gets up hours before me, but checking recent tweets will reduce duplicate messages.

2) Take note of the received time stamp

The addition of the time stamp [HH:MM] is automatically appended to all received updates and will help to put the tweet in context.  This was particularly handy this morning where there was as much as a hour delay from when the update was sent to Twitter and when the SMS was received

3) Gift horse getting what he paid for… or cliché du jour

I wanted to defend the tweets from the transit authority this morning.  I think it is absolutely fabulous that there are such updates and use them to supplement the more to the minute, live feed from passengers on the train.  I won’t pretend to know the chain of command that is involved with getting the official tweets sent, but I suspect these are average delays at a particular moment in time.  As a rider one should factor the time when the update is sent with other surrounding updates.

4) Just the facts, ma’am

Please refrain from editorial tweets and stay on topic.  In case you forgot have a look at the updating guide.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 2:55 pm and is filed under @caltrain, Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.