I’m happy to announce that after a good test run at the Rewired State event a couple of weeks ago, the Tube Updates API is now live and ready to be used at tubeupdates.com/ – You can request updates from any line (including the Docklands Light Railway) in either JSON or XML format and everything is structured to give you as much information as possible e.g. station closures, why there are ‘minor delays’, etc.

But that’s not all! I am caching the data (and have been since 1st Jan 2009) so you can also go back in time and look at the underground system at any point in time! I wrote a rather rudimentary stats analyser for my Rewired State project which shows you the basic reliability over the past couple of months but that is just a taster of what you can do with the information now available.

I’ll be releasing new versions of the RSS feed shortly so that non-developer types can still access the data – I’ll be announcing those on this blog and on my twitter feed once they are ready in the next few days. In the mean time, please play around with the API. There are no real usage terms but I’d love to know how you are using it so please get in touch if you make use of it!

For those that come to this site regularly, you may have noticed that it’s undergone a major overhaul! I’ve done a complete redesign (looks best in Safari) and replaced the blog engine with Wordpress so I should be blogging a lot more frequently. I’m also about to become a full time freelance PHP developer and web consultant but I’ll be posting more details about that soon!!

Hi,

I’m sending you this note because you registered a mobile device to work with Twitter over our UK number. I wanted to let you know that we are making some changes to the way SMS works on Twitter. There is some good news and some bad news.

I’ll start with the bad news. Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number. If you enjoy receiving updates from Twitter via +44 762 480 1423, we are recommending that you explore some suggested alternatives.

Note: You will still be able to UPDATE over our UK number.

Before I go into more detail, here’s a bit of good news: Twitter will be introducing several new, local SMS numbers in countries throughout Europe in the coming weeks and months. These new numbers will make Twittering more accessible for you if you’ve been using SMS to send long-distance updates from outside the UK.

Why are we making these changes?

Mobile operators in most of the world charge users to send updates. When you send one message to Twitter and we send it to ten followers, you aren’t charged ten times–that’s because we’ve been footing the bill. When we launched our free SMS service to the world, we set the clock ticking. As the service grew in popularity, so too would the price.

Our challenge during this window of time was to establish relationships with mobile operators around the world such that our SMS services could become sustainable from a cost perspective.

We achieved this goal in Canada, India, and the United States. We can provide full incoming and outgoing SMS service without passing along operator fees in these countries.

We took a risk hoping to bring more nations onboard and more mobile operators around to our way of thinking but we’ve arrived at a point where the responsible thing to do is slow our costs and take a different approach. Since you probably don’t live in Canada, India, or the US, we recommend receiving your Twitter
updates via one of the following methods.

m.twitter.com works on browser-enabled phones
m.slandr.net works on browser-enabled phones
TwitterMail.com works on email-enabled phones
Cellity [http://bit.ly/12bw4R] works on java-enabled phones
TwitterBerry [http://bit.ly/MFAfJ] works on BlackBerry phones
Twitterific [http://bit.ly/1WxjwQ] works on iPhones

Twitter SMS by The Numbers

It pains us to take this measure. However, we need to avoid placing undue burden on our company and our service. Even with a limit of 250 messages received per week, it could cost Twitter about $1,000 per user, per year to send SMS outside of Canada, India, or the US. It makes more sense for us to establish fair billing arrangements with mobile operators than it does to pass these high fees on to our users.

Twitter will continue to negotiate with mobile operators in Europe, Asia, China, and The Americas to forge relationships that benefit all our users. Our goal is to provide full, two-way service with Twitter via SMS to every nation in a way that is sustainable from a cost perspective. Talks with mobile companies around the world continue. In the meantime, more local numbers for updating via SMS are on the way. We’ll keep you posted.

Thank you for your attention,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.
http://twitter.com/biz

Now this has upset a LOT of users (especially in Australia) but is the general outcry from the web community really justified? As Twitter themselves say, it could cost them nearly $1000 per user per year to send txts and with 2.2 million users that ain’t cheap. It has always been a mystery to me as to how Twitter makes money and how they are able to send all these txts for free so it comes as no surprise that they have finally stopped doing it.

But what about the alternatives? I’m using a mac and an iPhone so I’ve gone for the obvious choice of Twitteriffic on both which does a pretty good job. On my mac, I get a little chirpy noise and a popup when I get a tweet which works a lot better than an SMS in a lot of ways and this is similar on the iPhone. The only downside is that the iPhone doesn’t support 3rd party apps running in the background so at present you have to open the app to see if there are any updates which is a bit of a pain. However, this is due to change with iPhone Firmware 2.1 which is hopefully going to be with us some time in September.

Once the ability to receive twitters from Twitteriffic seamlessly occurs, I think it will prove a lot more successful than the txt message route. Firstly, because it will cost nothing to reply (whereas previously it was very easy to reply to a twitter from a txt and thus get charged for it) and secondly because new features can be added to the service. Twitteriffic already supports location awareness on the iPhone so people can see where I am twittering from – a small improvement but an improvement none the less.

In response to everybody shouting at Twitter about this issue, why don’t they instead complain about the mobile phone companies who are so greedy in the affected countries that they refuse to do a deal with Twitter? It comes as no surprise to me that in the UK the cellular networks refused to budge on pricing but that is no fault of Twitter who have been paying so much over the last year and a half to make a great service at absolutely no cost to the end user (not even adding advertising to tweets which would seem an obvious money making route).

So in answer to “is Twitter now dead” I would say no! There are still several uses for it (e.g. I use it to keep a micro blog on my homepage) and with several applications for all types of phones it is still easy to stay updated. It will become really useful for me however when Apple release the next iPhone update with push technology – then it will be as if nothing had even changed.

Update: Amusingly it looks like someone is already trying to cash in on the lack of SMS from Twitter around most of the world. Apparently tweetSMS will “send you individual, hourly or daily updates from all (or just some) of your friends” for a “very small fee”. We’ll see how small that fee is when they launch I suppose…

I’ve installed Kampyle on my site (using a custom icon as their default choices are pretty bad – animated gif anyone?) and I’ve already had quite a few pieces of feedback. The great thing is that I’ve been able to fix a few bugs people have alerted me to and then have Kampyle email them back to let them know that the issue has been resolved.

Kampyle is pretty good as it is, but the thing that is putting Kampyle on the map is their recent integration with Google Analytics which means you can see all of your feedback stats within your Google Analytics account. The way they have done this is particularly clever – You need to download the Grease Monkey Firefox Extension and install the Kampyle Grease Monkey script, but then when you go to your Google Analytics account you’ll see the Kampyle stats showing up in their own dashboard widgets. Pretty clever really. This was a major incentive for me as it means I can now see all of my stats in one place rather than having multiple accounts across the internet.

So, if you’d like to leave any feedback on the site just click on the “Leave Feedback” banner in the bottom right hand corner!

Now I wouldn’t find this strange coming from a lot of people as I can understand that a lot of people have no idea about RSS and would get confused trying to work out what an aggregator is. But from a web developer? Come on! If the people that develop websites with RSS can’t even be bothered to use it then what chance is there of the general populous using it?

I use mac mail to manage all of my RSS feeds and find that it does a fairly good job – everything gets synced over to my iPhone as well so I can keep up to date when I’m on the train etc. I also have a few RSS feeds on my iGoogle homepage so I can see the latest xkcd or dilbert strip whilst I’m pretending to work. Now I’m fairly sure you can set Outlook up to receive RSS feeds – so why doesn’t this developer do that? Apparently, if Windows were to crash (unlikely but stay with me on this) then he would lose all of the RSS feeds he was tracking and therefore have to add them again so it’s not worth doing. “You could use Google Reader or any other number of online aggregators” say I. “Too much effort” says he. I give up.

So, in the next day or so there will be a “sign up” button on this site so that those of you who can’t be bothered with RSS can get email alerts when a new message is posted. I’ve also set up a twitter account which will be syndicating the posts on this site as and when they happen – the account to follow is bendodson_com. Oh, and for those of you that have moved into the 21st century, here is the good old RSS feed.