Thingy of the week: Twaffik’s twiffic travel updates

This week’s thingy of the week is a crowd sourcing experiment which could get the city moving again.
Two traffic weary Manchester residents have come up with the big red bus that is Twaffik which receives news of transport problems and issues alerts to subscribers.
One of those behind the scheme, Paul Carruthers, who also woks with the Manchester Business School’s Institute for Social Media explained that his own commute to work had sparked the idea: “One time I was listening to the radio traffic reports, sat in traffic which wasn’t moving, and there was no mention of what the problem was.
“Often there’s no local information on what’s happening”.
The idea is beautifully simple in concept – if you, I or anyone else sees a travel problem on the roads, rails or buses – we send a text message to report it.
Then everyone who subscribes to the free service, gets an alert.

The distribution has been made possible by some tweaking of the micro-blogging platform Twitter. To take part you need to have Twitter account and then sign up to follow the Twaffik bus.
You’ll then receive alerts on your PC or you can use a service to relay them to your mobile phone.
And if you want to let everyone know about that snarl up – just text to the Twaffik bus using your phone or PC and share that knowledge.
BUT, as the other creator, Alan Holding the head of the technology team at Manchester Digital Development Agency is at pains to stress – not while you’re driving!
The success of the scheme will depend greatly on the number of people who participate and also how active people are at sharing – being good citizens even if there’s nothing in it for them immediately.
“When something happens, say on a tram platform, people might not know what the problem is but they could still text to say ‘there’s a problem here, go to Piccadilly’ or something so that other passengers know about it” said Alan.
If you want to join the scheme and help make this service a success, you can find out more at www.twaffik.info or follow at www.twitter.com/twaffic.
We will be hunting around for blogs or websites to feature here, add to the blogroll and on the e-view page in Saturday’s M.E.N so, if you’ve got one to nominate, submit a link below or via the contacts page. The only criteria is that they have some connection with Manchester.