I haven’t updated the blog in about 6 months mostly because the service is fairly self sufficient. Unfortunately I’m very behind on generating update keys and I know a lot of you have mailed requesting them more than once. I haven’t forgotten about the requests so much as I got in the weeds with respect to free time.
I’ll try my best to get these kicked out soon so more can help make the service better.
Community! Lindsay Schauer of Twitter write a great blog post about this service for the new Twitter Tales site.
Also as a followup to an editorial update Mark Otto succinctly rephrased my response with “We don’t follow you for personal opinions; we follow you as a community wanting to know how we’re getting to/from work each day.” Well said, Mark!
The service is also approaching the 3 year anniversary and there are 4,490 @caltrain follows, 465 @bikecar, and 534 email keys have bee issued. Quite an accomplishment, I think, for a small grassroots project.
Thank you to everyone who has continued to help make this a valuable service to the community.
It is March already and I am 2 months behind in generating update keys for people. I am very sorry for not getting to it, but I started a new job in early January which has been consuming 97.45% of my time and then in February I thought it would be a great idea to move. Now that I’ve moved in I will spend a little time going through all the emails and generating those keys.
Thank you for your patients.
Twitter changed the functionality of @-replys somewhat which allows for group like feature. Reading the description it is not immediately obvious if this will be helpful in any way to improve the service.
I’m on a working vacation right now in Boston and NYC so won’t have much time to dig into this until I return on Tuesday.
It is unfortunate to learn about two suicides in as many days (and the first of the year) and it is unfortunateit is this news that brings me to posting at all. @caltrain certainly helped me out on my morning commute today as I suspect it had for others. I had intended an early train but adjusted my schedule after getting the first tweet. This gave me plenty of time to get to 4th and King and get an update of delays. I was able to get a delicious latte from The Creamery and Lactaid from Walgreens to allow for a pleasant gastro experience.
It was nice to also see actual official tweets by a Bay Area transit representative. Official tweets from such entities are prefixed with O: to designate so. I also want to remind everyone of the updating guide and to try to check recent tweet history to prevent too many redundant tweets. Also consider the newsworthiness of the tweet. I don’t censor, edit, or otherwise prohibit content but I want to remind everyone of the 1,200 followers many may be getting SMS updates for each tweet.
In other news I had a phone interview with Sebastian Kunz of Talk 910KNEW / green960 KKGN a few weeks ago to talk about @caltrain and @bikecar. I’m not certain if it made it to air as I was back in Cleveland for several days, but the potential exposure and awareness was cool.
Finally I wanted everyone to know that it is just me running this service so if replies to email for update keys or otherwise take a little while it is either because I am stuck with my real job or out of town. Sometimes I do miss email all together so if its been a long time in getting a reply send a reminder.
Thank you to everyone who has been helping make this as useful as I had imagined it could be.