As you may know I don’t alter the content of tweets other than limit to a certain length to be able to append time stamps. I believe that the community should be able to take my idea and initial set of guidelines and mold them to what really works. It is with that belief I felt the service would evolve in a positive and useful way as Caltrain changed its service. That is why I called them guidelines. As it turned out everyone embraced them and felt they met the needs of the majority and as a result essentially became the rule more than a guide.

Recently the use of ‘bombardier’ and ‘gallery’ for car type and ‘limited’ and ‘bbullet’ for service type have been used with greater frequency to the frustration of many people. This frustration has taken form in emails directly to me and to what amounts as a flame war on the public feed where hundreds of people follow. Also it appears users have been editorializing, not consolidating multiple status in 1 tweet, and updating with no useful content.

It is because I received multiple direct emails from users saying, “decreasing the usefulness of the service”, “poor low signal to noise ratio”, and “tweets have taken over my twitter feed on a number of occasions [...] tweeting at length and uselessly about train type, sometimes with editorial comments, and doesn’t use the established conventions” that I realized I cannot take a complete laissez-faire attitude if I have any expectations of the service remaining useful.

It is because of this that I must now insist people adhere to the Updating Guide for updates. The community has embraced my vision and has been very vocal about sticking with it.  Also the Updating Guide says at the very top,

What makes an update useful or helpful? No matter what, updates need to be newsworthy and concise. If things are normal or how they should be there is no reason to announce it. Think of this service as a EAS for Caltrain. Too many updates could cause frustration or desensitize users who may stop following or updating which hurts everyone in the long run.

I cannot help but to wonder why people insist on ignoring this fundamental belief.

One approach moving forward I had was replacing any instance of ‘bombardier’ with ‘new’ and ‘gallery’ with ‘old’ before sent to Twitter. ‘Limited’ and ‘bbullet’ would also be removed because the service type is encoded in the route number itself. As stated before:

1 = Local
2 = Limited
3 = Baby Bullet

In fact the direction (NB and SB) is also included — odd routes are Northbound and even routes are Southbound, but I am willing to allow the extra notation there.

But Ravi, you’re being hypocritical!

Yes, but this is why — I want the service to be easy for everyone. It wasn’t until 3 years did I find out the direction and service encoding and it was because someone told me. I suspect I’m not alone. Also I know countless people who outright refused to “ride the old trains.” Not my words but theirs. What is an old train here? Yep, a gallery. I didn’t make it up. It is what it is.

So lets re-recap:

1. Stick with the Updating Gude — drop the use of ‘bombardier’, ‘gallery’, ‘limited’ and ‘bbullet’ from the update.
2. Consolidate your tweets.
3. Keep your editorials to your blog or own Twitter feed. Some people subscribe to SMS updates of the feeds and some of those people pay for each SMS. Consider checking the feed for recent updates before you send one and ask yourself if it meets the criteria I set forth in the Updating Guide.

I am saddened that I even had to write this post, but I am thrilled it took this long before I had to. As hope everyone understands and realigns their updates with the Updating Guide and the requests of the community. Posts will remain unedited (aside from length) and will remain for as long as people respect the service and others.

In other news while getting on SB236 I noticed a new sign (left) at the end of the cab car noting how many bike cars were in that train configuration.  Am I slow on the uptake or is this brand spankin’ new?  I didn’t see a similar sign on the engine but didn’t look very hard.  Assuming this is actually updated regularly it should be trivial for someone at a terminal to note the configurations early in the morning and do a mass update.

Hmm, and while reading through the tweet history I found this Aug 11 tweet noting the new signs.  I guess I have been in the dark.

Finally a few people have asked me if posting guidelines have changed.  No they have not.  What do I mean?

Please remember:

- Leave the editorial comments to your own feed

- Please use OLD and NEW notation when referring to gallery and bombardier respectively.  Not everyone knows the difference and it will just eat up on the maximum character limit you have.  Fellow contributors have asked that people follow this to no avail.  I am now asking everyone.  Please do this do I don’t have to do message pre-processing.

- Please omit the class of service (e.g. bullet, limited, local).  As noted by a contributor this is encoded in the train number.  The first digit represents the class where 3 is bullet, 2 is limited, and 1 is local.

- Timestamps at the end of each tweet are inserted by me.  There is no need to manually add it as it will eat into your max tweet length and cause confusion for others.

- Please keep the tweet to the account it belongs in.  Car configurations belong in @bikecar

- Only update when there is something to say.  A train that is on time or even <5 minutes behind schedule is not news.

As always I want to thank everyone for contributing and helping out.  Remember this will only be successful if people play by the rules.  I don’t have many at all so please stick with them.  If you have concerns about them or anything I’ve said please do not hesitate to contact me.

I suspect the utility of my service will decline with this new data, however I believe it will still be useful when the trains are configured differently.

While there were only a few tweets that were unrecognizable by my parser everyone should take a look at the Updating Guide for formatting suggestions.  I’m currently matching on /(1|one)|(2|two)/i and /(old|gallery)|(new|bombardier)/i so as long as you have that in there we should be good.

One problem I ran into is graphing the data in a meaningful way.  I looked at gnuplot, but damn if I could figure it out.  Granted I spent 5 minutes looking at it, but if I couldn’t get it to work in that time I didn’t want to waste any more on it since I wasn’t sure if anyone would even get value from it.  I took a look at Excel and it kinda did what I wanted, but I use Excel about once a year and I just create trivial sheets.

So here is what I am hoping someone can help me with — graphing this damn data.  Right now I have a list in the following format, but I can save it in pretty much any way.

{DATE} {TRAIN} {NUMBER OF SLOTS}

The X axis would be DATE, Y would be NUMBER OF SLOTS, and each TRAIN would be a separate series.

Any help?