Commuter Feed

Hey, so I just discovered Sitepoint did a writeup of Commuter Feed.

Its a site I read pretty regularly so pretty psyched about that. Been lots of other blog writeups in the past few months, and a little too super busy to give a shout. Thanks to every blogger who’s written about the site, your support is greatly appreciated!

-Ron

Today we’re releasing a set of “open knowledge” projects called “Zenji Open Projects” at http://open.zenjiweb.com . These projects are aimed at solving some “big picture” problems with Commuter Feed, primarily creating an open, distributed Twitter alternative and standardizing transportation alert data into an easily consumable format.

Zenji’s official announcement can be found on our Tumblr here.

If you are a developer and like Commuter Feed, please make sure to check it out and contribute if you can.

If you’ve posted some reports to Commuter Feed over the last week or so, you’ll have noticed they either haven’t shown up, or showed up days after they were posted. This issue is a result of the much-publicized Twitter meltdown over the past few months. Apparently Twitter has pulled our ability to collect your “@commuter” replies sporadically over the past week. According to their status blog, it should be fixed this week, but we’ll see. In the mean time, hang in there…

Thanks!

Ron

Thanks to SimpleHelp.net for proving we’re one of the most productive Twitter apps out there, and to ProgrammableWeb for making us Mashup of the Day, a distinction we’ve gotten from more than one site now.

It appears that the problem with the Pownce API has been resolved. Pownce away.

Hi,

Just wanted to let you know we’ve become aware of a problem where posts to Commuter Feed from Pownce are not showing. We believe this situation is related to an error at Pownce’s API so we’ll be waiting to see when its fixed. In the mean time you can use Twitter.

Thanks!

Ron

Yes thats right – we have the most “replied to” Tweet of all time. Check it out: http://twitbuzz.com/conv/alltime/

OK, yes we received this honor on a technicality. Some clever hacker out there plugged us into the Bankok traffic monitoring system a while back, and it looks like the Thai freeways have been giving us hundreds of reports per day. But hey, they’re still replies.

So eat it, FoodFeed!
(Yea I’m sure they get that pun all the time, whatever)

Here is the blog post where I learned of this great achievement: http://en.moraaz.org/twitbuzz-tracking-the-memes-of-twitter/

Ron

If you didn’t know already, Commuter Feed works with Pownce as well as Twitter.

To use Commuter Feed on Pownce, use it the same as you would Twitter (including the “@commuter” and city code), but be sure to send your update to “The Public” or it won’t show.

If you have any issues, make sure to report them in our Google Group.

Thanks!

Just discovered we got a nice little blurb yesterday in a post about Veronica Belmont’s favorite Twitter API sites: http://www.veronicabelmont.com/2008/03/my-favorite-sites-using-the-twitter-api/

Commuter Feed now has a blog.

We know that a lot of our users would like to be able to keep up with Commuter Feed, track our progress, and get more involved as we build out the service. We’re also aware that finding documentation is a little tricky.

Today, we announce a new chunk of Commuter Feed, where you can read up on announcements and also more easily access resources such as help documentation and city submissions.

To keep even more up to date, we’re collecting email addresses for a forthcoming mailing list. When we’re about to launch a major new feature, if you subscribe you’ll be the first to know. You can sign up here: http://zenji.wufoo.com/forms/join-our-mailing-list/

As always, feel free to leave feedback in our Community. We love to hear what you think.

So read up and check back. We have lots of stuff in store for Commuter Feed in the months to come…