Crowdsource traffic news with Twaffik

Dec 08 2008

Posted by Martin as Internet, Twitter

As microblogging grows in popularity so do the ways in which people are using it. An interesting example of this has sprung up here in my home city of Manchester. Two enterprising members of the local tech community have put together a way to crowdsource traffic news.

Twaffik is an automated system that works via a Twitter profile. You follow Twaffik and it will automatically follow you back. Then, whenever you’re out and about and spot trouble on the region’s roads or public transport network you can send Twaffik a Direct Message via Twitter. The service then tweets out your traffic news to all the service’s followers.

Put together by Paul Carruthers and Alan Holding, it’s a great idea. From what I can tell there’s some clever email parsing (of text from Twitter notification emails) and automation scripting going on here. Although it’s currently only intended to be used in Manchester it could easily be rolled out to other areas.

The danger with Twaffik is that it becomes an easy way for spammers to reach a large audience. They only need to send one DM to spam lots of people. That should be kept to a minimum as there will be some stringent moderating of users going on and Terms of Service prohibit misusing the service.

Taking the soft launch route, Twaffik only has 14 users at present and there are only a couple of traffic news updates sent per day. However, if the service takes off they could face a problem of too much content. If all Manchester’s Twitterers began using it on a daily basis they’d quickly stop again as their Twitter feeds would be filled with traffic news and it would be hard to find updates from their friends amongst tales of motorway pileups and late buses.

So, there’s a scalability problem here. There are a couple of ways they can get round it. The first is to pray that Twitter launch a huge overhaul to the basic platform. Twitter client Tweetdeck is famed for its ability to group the people you follow in whatever way you see fit. If Twitter supported grouping at platform level everyone, not only Tweetdeck users, could create groups. They could maybe have a ‘Music people’ group, a ‘Web 2.0 Gasbags’ group (Hi!) and a ‘Traffic News’ group. That way Twaffik updates wouldn’t interfere with the rest of the Twitter experience.

Will that happen? Who knows; in the meantime, how about mirroring the Twaffik service on a custom platform - maybe a Laconi.ca install? They could still serve information to Twitter but if Twaffik was running on its own server it could stay up even when Twitter’s down and there’d be all sorts of interesting ways they could develop as they’d be running the service on their own terms, not Twitter’s.

That’s all for the future though. For now it’s just good to see that Paul and Alan are trying something new, interesting and socially useful with Twaffik. You can watch a video of them explaining the service over at The Mancunian Way.

JNathan

I'd have thought a better implementation would be using Twitter search. Have people send their traffic updates to @twaffik and then simply search for @twaffik using search.twitter.com, Tweetie, Twitterfon, Summizer etc (which also allow you to save searches) when you want to check the latest information. Essentially like a hashtag. Its simple, less prone to the spam problem and would work on a pull rather than push basis (which I feel is necessary for this type of service). As a proxy while in London I simply run a Twitter search for Tube (or see @tubinator) to find out about any service disruptions just before I leave work. I don't need to know about them while im at work though, which is where I think Twaffik falls down.

The problem with the current implementation is that I probably don't want to know about every traffic situation in Manchester and there is no way of automated filtering of tweets received. And as you point out as the service scales its usefulness in appearing in the regular Twitter timeline diminishes.

Perhaps long term we could get some location aware goodness in here. i.e. a Twinkle-esque show me all @twaffik replies within a 5 mile radius

MartinSFP

Good points! Having spoken to Paul about it recently, I know that it's very much an experimental service and I'm sure the model will be refined in the coming months.

brokendrum70

Thanks, Martin. Nice post. Just to clarify, Twaffik does use the Twitter API, and the email stuff is more parsing than scraping. :)

Also, we are aware of the potential problem of contributors' Twitter streams being overrun by lots of big red buses, but is this more a problem with the way Twitter works? There's a similar problem when people you follow use #hashtags to live blog an event.

It's also worth making clear that Twaffik is an experiment at this stage. It's part of the Institute for Social Media's research work - see http://i4sm.org for more.

Thanks, Alan H.

MartinSFP

Thanks Alan! I've updated the post to correct it based on your first paragraph. As I mention, the 'overload' problem would be solved if Twitter was updated to natively support groups. Here's hoping!

JNathan

I think that their desire to keep Twitter as simple as possible might make them not bother with a group/lists implementation. While groups are useful in FB and FF, their implementation is not as simple to use as it could be.

I guess they are halfway there with their device notifications system, which can be set on a per follow basis. That effectively makes a two group system, though sadly now useless in the UK without IM or SMS.

ontarioemperor

Commuterfeed uses a slightly different system, in which traffic tweets are preceded by a three digit airport code (e.g. "SNA" for John Wayne Airport in Orange County, California). Responses, rather than being sent through Twitter, are instead directed to separate web pages. In this post I contrast Commuterfeed and Twaffik (and also imply nice things about Sally Shapiro, but that's another story).

Paul Carruthers

Sorry to take my time in responding...what with smc_mcr last night, having to meet Mrs C at the Xmas Markets and then having a busy day at work, time marched on.

Anyway, just a couple of comments in response to the others.

Twitter seemed the natural option as that's where the crowd is and we didn't want to go creating a 'new crowd' using laconi.ca - but having said that I'm ignorant to the capabilities of laconi.ca, so maybe there is an angle to investigate.

But, the underpinnings of Twaffik are that it's an experiment. We're not a startup in it for financial gain, which maybe people expect us to be, but actually running this as action research as part of the Institute for Social Media. It came out of frustration of getting stuck in Manchester with little information about the travel infrastructure...and because people leave work at all kinds of different times of the day, I think it's valid to the messages pinging throughout the day.

We're interested in what it takes to get something like this going, how it grows and what utility people get out of it. It's an innovative approach to traffic news and a different model to commuterfeed, which I must admit I hadn't heard of when we started on Twaffik. Even more than that, we want to see if we can turn something like twitter into a service that has appeal to the mainstream - that's a big ask because twitter clearly haven't done it themselves as yet.

The hashtag option is interesting and feasible, but I'm starting to experience hashtag overload and there's no opt out - if you are following someone (or more likely a number of people) who are using a particular hashtag then you're likely to get bombarded - unfollowing them all isn't an option - is there another way? With the follow model you can simply unfollow if it becomes a pest and just look at the twaffik.info website.

Whether that little red bus becomes a pest we'll have to see and as it's action research we'll adapt if it does, based on the feedback we get.

Similarly, in that vein, we're really interested in the suggestions from the Manchester Twitterati...maybe we'll open this up for further development to willing volunteers. We'll see.

It also highlights something that Alan has been talking about for a while. There's a wrinkle in Twitters model somewhere here that sits on a fine line between being able to filter out the noise and retain the good stuff...but I'm not sure if they are mutually exclusive facets of the service - as JNathan alludes to.

As for the future, we have plans in the pipeline for extending the experiment in Manchester and beyond, but for right now hopefully we can get a few more manchester twitter users on board.

-pc.

MartinSFP

Thanks for the response Paul. Twaffik is an interesting experiment and I'll be interested to see how it develops. As you say it definitely needs more users!

With regard to Laconi.ca, it's open source so in theory you could actually modify it to somehow feed into Twitter for people who want the information there while it also being a completely separate system that you could run entirely as you see fit without the need for Twitter's backbone. That way Twitter becomes just one way for people to access Twaffik and it's still there if Twitter goes down.

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