The slides from the talk given by Alan Holding at the Social Media Café Manchester on 14 May 2009 about Twaffik, a Twitter-based crowdsourced travel alert system for Manchester.

1. The slides from
the talk done by
Alan Holding at
the Social Media
Cafe Manchester
on 14 May 2009 –
–

2. Paul Carruthers
@paulcarruthers

3. Alan Holding
@boredlizard

4. What is Twaffik?
(it is not a business, btw)

5. An experiment
using Twitter that
lets people in
Manchester share
transport problems

6. How does it work?

7. 1. You go on Twitter
and follow @twaffik

8. 2. Twaffik follows you
(which is important)

9. 3. You send Twaffik a direct
message about something
d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the
trains from
Levenshulme are
late again

10. 4. Twaffik retweets the
message to its followers
man rail Blinking
flip the trains from
Levenshulme are
late again

11. 5. Everyone gets depressed

12. What’ gives with
the clumsy
message format?

13. d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the trains
from Levenshulme are
late again

14. d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the trains
from Levenshulme are
late again
d twaffik
Send a direct
message to Twaffik

15. d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the trains
from Levenshulme are
late again
man
Three-letter airport
code for Manchester

16. d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the trains
from Levenshulme are
late again
rail
Type of transport
problem

17. d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the trains
from Levenshulme are
late again
The actual message
Blinking flip...

18. d twaffik man rail
Blinking flip the trains
from Levenshulme are
late again
Only 140 characters
Lots of junk before
the good stuff

20. Popular?
Approx 170 messages since
November 2008

21. Twaffikers

22. How it really works
(the technical gubbins)

23. A mix of
technologies...
Apache Google Twitter
PHP
server Mail API

24. Twaffik runs
two routines
every minute

25. The first checks
Gmail for new
followers and
follows them back

26. The process starts
with the emails
Twitter sends out

27. Notices settings

28. We set up Gmail to
attach labels to
messages received
from Twitter

29. Gmail labels

30. Gmail labels

31. We then scan the
email header to
find the username

32. X-Twittersenderscreenname: therealprez

33. We then use the
Twitter API to follow
that person

35. http://twitter.com/friendships/create/
therealprez.xml

36. We then change the
Gmail label to stop
that person being
followed next time

37. Following

38. Following

39. The second script
checks Gmail for
direct messages
and retweets them

40. Retweeting

41. Retweeting

42. To filter or not?

43. Bypass
Bybeep

44. Why not use the
Twitter API for
everything?

45. Because it would
chew up our API
allowance

46. “The default rate limit for calls to the
REST API is 100 requests per hour.”

47. So, what next?

48. Apply for “‘whitelisting
with the Twitter API?

49. Do an iPhone app?
Courtesy of Apple

50. Thanks for listening
twaffik.info