So I know that Yahoo! Pipes isn’t anything new, but I was struck with the realization at lunch that while lots of people tweet about their morning and evening commute over Hwy 17 (from Santa Cruz to San Jose or vise versa), there wasn’t anyone really aggregating those tweets into a real time feed. So I registered the screen name @hwy17traffic and when I got home from work I sat down to figure out the best way to pull the data together. Yahoo! Pipes is basically a wysiwig editor that lets you input feeds or data from around the web, manipulate it (or filter it  in my case), and then export it as an RSS feed. With no prior knowledge, I only had to watch the short intro video and do a quick Google search to fill in the blanks and within 30 minutes I had a working data feed. Then using a service like tweetbots I was able to post that feed to the twitter account. So within about 5 minutes or so of someone posting about their commute over Hwy 17, my new account with “retweet” what they said. Ideally, this would let you see almost real time updates of the traffic conditions there.  The next stage will be to see about how I can get information off of the CHP and Caltrans websites to add even more data to the stream. Fun times!

Filed under: Computers by Jonathan