Another Twitter Bot, perhaps a little boring of me, but maybe useful to Auckland Twitter users. Based on the Wellington version I made previously, just a slight tweak to the bounding box.
http://twitter.com/AuckRoadAlerts
A note to AA - if you don’t like me doing this, just let me know and I’ll take it down, it should be driving traffic to your site though.
It seems AA have updated their site using the GeoSmart Mapping API. I noticed they use an AJAX request to grab a JSON encoded object that neatly describes all the information I need. The JSON object not only breaks the incident data down into component parts but also includes NZMG map coordinates so I can choose exactly the bounding box I want to capture alerts from.
This change actually made it easier to take the twitter bot from a flaky hack to something a bit more robust in just a few minutes. I’m not sure if they intended that when they built the new version of the site, but it shows how using a really simple format like JSON for data interchange can deliver mash-up potential.
I hope AA don’t mind me scraping their data, if they do, they are welcome to get in touch.
http://twitter.com/WellyRoadAlerts
Trying to explain what’s cool about Twitter to a colleague yesterday, I put together a small script that scrapes the road alerts from AA Roadwatch and posts them to a twitter feed.
Why? Well Twitter is unique in that as well as being a social messaging platform, it also acts as a RSS/REST/SMS/IM gateway. I can post a message using the web service, and anyone can receive it as an SMS/text message or in their IM client if they follow it. In a way, it can be seen as a message queue with a publisher and multiple subscribers.
The beauty of Twitter is that I could whip up a first version of the WellyRoadAlerts mashup in just 20 minutes, as most of the work has been done for me.
There are many other examples of this sort of mashup out there, but in the meantime, some Wellingtonians might find this useful.
Check it out: http://twitter.com/WellyRoadAlerts
If you work for AA and don’t like me doing this, please let me know.
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