Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Metra Taking Over @metradelays and the Rest of the Twitter Delay Feeds

I set up the @metradelays service on Twitter a year ago to help commuters keep track of their train lines. The service received an overwhelmingly positive response and collected more than 1,000 followers across all lines. Better access to transit data was clearly a common need.

Last September, Metra redesigned their website; this had the side effect of breaking the Twitter feeds. Not finding myself with the free time to fix the service, the Twitter accounts have sat dormant for the past few months.

Fast forward to today, when Metra contacted me about taking control of the accounts. They are looking to provide service information across more outlets, and were interested in taking advantage of the Metra/Twitter accounts I set up. Since I still have no immediate plans to update the service, this seems like the best chance for all the @metradelays followers to start getting updates on Twitter again.

Here's hoping Metra builds us a great service!

3 comments:

MLWeiland said...

Thanks for doing this Tony. It seemed like when the idea first surfaced that service updates should go on Twitter, Metra wanted a million dollars and 18 months to make it happen. But you showed them how it's done (and, I suspect, a lot faster & cheaper).

Unknown said...

Gangsta!

Sharlene King said...

sadly, they haven't updated it since 2/17/10 and they definitely have had delays.

it's like they decided to delete all your tweets and post nothing in hopes that people think they never have delays.