Piers Jones

Crowdsourcing UKtrain delays on Twitter

I first found out about the UK trains updates service when I saw this tweet by @subutcher when stuck in the #uksnow.

The service which was put together by Ben Smith aggregates travel alerts for each train line from the BBC backstage travel feeds and other sources.

Users can then follow the twitter account that corresponds with the trainline that they usually use and can be updated to any travel issues. So for example I follow the account for National Express East Anglia.

A recent feature allows users to get delays retweeted by that account by using a '*' in their tweet.

I think that this is a fascinating project in 'real time' crowdsourcing. I've been comparing the unofficial feed provided by UK trains with the 'official' version from national rail and have found the unofficial feed to be much more up to date and helpful.

I'll be really interested to see how this service evolves over the coming months. At the moment there is a time lag between someone posting an update and the tweet arriving and hopefully that can be made quicker.

You can find a list of all the UK train twitter accounts to follow on the homepage. So if you are a regular train commuter like me or just interested in crowdsourcing projects its worth a look.

Covering #uksnow with Twitter

I enjoyed being a small part of the Guardian News blog coverage of the snow across the UK today. The editorial team included a component on the page which looked for tweets from a selected list of twitter accounts when the hashtag #uksnow was included. So having been included on the list I had the opportunity to send a few tweets with that hashtag and let more people than usual know about the delights of my daily commute.

It was a quick, effective and relatively easy way of showing real time coverage of an event that had an impact across a wide area. Alongside the UK Snow map which shows pictures submitted to twitter with a postcode, I thought it was a really cool way to cover the big freeze.

Twitterjobsearch

A relatively new job aggregator twitterjobsearch is pulling together all the jobs posted to twitter across the web. In this interview with Robert Scoble, cofounder Willaim Fischer claims that in the past month twitterjobsearch have used natural language search to publish 280k unique job vacancies to their site, making it one of the top five job boards in the world by jobs volume already.

found on cheezehead

Twitter explained

Twitter in plain english from those people at common craft...

you can follow me on twitter at twitter.com/piersj

Using Twitter tools to track sentiment

I'm still glued to Politweets for tracking the US presidential elections and more features are promised soon. As the volume and geographical usage of Twitter spreads then it could become a very useful source of changing sentiment. I'd have to leave it to a market researcher as to how representative the audience is right now. Maybe it's good for the 'early adopter / geek' view on things?

I tried some simple searches for two different topics related to Hugh's - using another tool called  Tweet Scan;

- There are only a few results for Hugh's chicken run a recent program by chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on channel 4 which aimed to convert the UK to free range chickens. Obviously not a subject to set UK Twitter alight just yet which is a shame.

- However Stormhoek the wine-label promoted by another Hugh (of GapingVoid fame) runs to pages of results so has clearly connected with Twitterers.

Anyway , here's hoping someone builds even more useful tools for this as the year progresses...

Update: I forgot about Tweeterboard - any other Twitter analytics tools out there?

Twitter for president

I think I'm going to enjoy tracking the US presidential elections on Twitter. The live coverage just works brilliantly.

Update: a great tool for tracking it here

How to send your facebook status directly to Twitter using RSS feeds

I came across this rather nice site today called Twitterfeed.com. You can set up any RSS feed to post directly to twitter . All you need is an OpenID to create an account with and the RSS feed from your Facebook status updates (or any other feed for that matter).

There are step by step instructions on this site of how to set up your facebook status to post to Twitter via Twitterfeed.com  and this includes how to find the RSS in Facebook which is really hidden away.
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The post from Facebook to Twitter only runs every 30 minutes right now but I think I can live with that.

Twitter and Facebook status updates

Today I am mostly wishing that Twitter tweets updated my Facebook status automatically to save all the bother of deciding which one to update and everything getting out of sync. Aren't they both there for the same reason?

I have installed the Twitter Facebook app but it doesn't work that way. I'm not sure whether thats because Facebook apps are all unable to access your status updates via the platform or that the app just doesn't have that particular feature.

From the comments on this post I am not alone.

Twitter: are you an information source, friend or information seeker?

Quite an interesting report on why people use microblogging platforms like Twitter. Apparently users are divided into 3 main types, Information sources like Scoble who are often 'hubs' for the networks of people around them, friends who like to chat or information seekers finding out what interests them.

No major surprises and if anyone could leave an explanation of the 'Clique Percolation Method' used to indentify communites in networks that I can actually understand I would be most grateful.

(Picked up somehow from twitterfacts which must have been in someone's shared items)