Guest post by Dan O'Neil.
In September of last year I launched CTA Tweet along with Harper Reed. When I wrote about the system on the CTA Tattler,
I warned that it might be lame. That lameness definitely came to pass,
and over the last few weeks I've made some changes that I think make the @ctatweet Twitter account a lot more useful.
First, a quick recap on why @ctatweet was lame:
- No mainline feed of authoritative information. The old CTA Alert
system that many of you may remember was great because the CTA itself
was the largest contributor of information to that system. This made
people trust it and to be quick to provide their own authoritative info - The @replies to individual train line Twitter accounts (@ctablue, @ctared, and so on) went unmonitored. Good info was tweeted there, but very often didn't make it to the main @ctatweet account, which has the lion's share of followers and where people would expect to see quality info
- The CTA RSS feeds-- which are often pumped into the CTA Tweet feeds-- supply a ton of quality, authoritative info (as I noted when they launched back in December of 2008),
but the vast majority of it relates to planned/ scheduled service
changes, elevator status messages, and minor shifts in bus stop
locations. Simple answers to important questions get lost in the flood
The thing we really need are answers to questions like, "should I
get on the bus or the train to go home?" and "am I going to be late for
work if I go down these stairs to the subway?", and "is everything on
my train line completely muffed up right now?"
So I think I have the fix, and with some help from you and the CTA, I think it can be even better.
The thing that really works is a central human editor collecting information from well-placed human sources and
republishing key bits so that people can make decisions. I have been actively managing the @ctatweet stream for a few weeks, giving it renewed attention. I've covered the Pink
Line outage (standing water), Northbound Lake Shore Drive traffic issues forcing the reroute of buses, recent Red Line issues, and even dead deer on the Yellow Line track.
I get this information from a cobbling of sources: the CTA RSS feeds, the RTA Transit Alerts from goroo.com, a Yahoo! Pipe I made that removes the planned reroutes and elevator status messages out of the CTA feeds, and the #CTA hashtag on Twitter, and @replies to ctatweet.
Seems like a lot of gymnastics, I know-- that's why I was hesitant to
do it when I first launched CTA Tweet. What I've found, though, is that
there are just a couple incidents a week that are worth tweeting about,
but they tend to be pretty high impact incidents. By mentally parsing
the messages in the normal course of a day, it's easy to retweet what
matters and let the rest slide by in the millions of other ancillary Internet beeps I consume.
So keep tweeting @replies for key info
about current service conditions on the Chicago Transit Authority. If
it's really good stuff that needs, the best thing to do is send an
email to info at ctatweet dot com. I've also contacted the CTA to see if
they could add this email address to important status messages -- more
on that later.
Filed under: CTA customer communication, CTA in the news
Tags: CTA on Twitter, CTA Tweet
Would it be possible to set up a system where @ctatweet automatically retweeted any direct messages sent to it? That would give you some control (because only people that @ctatweet follows can send a DM) but still allow for timely notifications to go out when you can't monitor the feed.
Hi, Chris. I'm thinking I could do that and I will definitely look into it. I know it's possible to republish @replies as well, but we run into quality/ relevance issues with that republishing either of those, I think.
For now, I am definitely able to keep up with managing it as a human editor, given the tools available. Direct messaging me at my personal account @juggernautco would get my attention too, along with the methods above.
If I get to be a bottleneck, we'll try something else :-)
Hey Dan, great work and I like where everything is going. I wanted to take a second to pimp a service that I've been working on that automatically retweets twitter replies sent to a specific account. We've talked a bit in the past about the @tamaletracker and how I was going to create a generic version of the retweet system that account runs on. I created a service that I call Spotd.
This service could easily be updated to take in Direct Messages as well as replies. If moderation is an issue, because there is always the possibility for spam tweets, I am working on a moderation feature that would allow the user to choose what replies/messages go through.
I can really see a great value in having the real time transit updates and see users benefiting from that kind of functionality utilized through the ctatweets. I'd love to work on something with you if you want to implement this.