Project: CommuterFeed.com

Project Type:
Internal Project

Our Roles:
Concept, Design & Implementation

Summary:
Commuter Feed is a free service that allows users to post traffic and transit reports in their local area using Twitter and Pownce.

Site URL:
www.commuterfeed.com

Commuter Feed is Zenji’s first product. Commuter Feed uses the Twitter and Pownce APIs to allow users to post and view reports on traffic and transit delays in their local area.

Commuter Feed has garnished much critical acclaim, with over 100 writeups by bloggers including ReadWriteWeb, CNet’s Webware, Wired, Lifehacker, Daring Fireball, Chris Brogan, and Veronica Belmont. It has also won two different “Mashup of the Day” awards, and been featured in top slots in several major web design collections, such as CSS Remix and CSS Mania.

Commuter Feed was launched as an of experiment in user behavior, exploring the power of “micro-blogging” for mission-critical purposes with a kind of web-based civic monitoring. It was also Zenji’s first experiment with the Django framework, and was produced for less than the cost of a nice TV. Not too bad.

One of the things we learned with Commuter Feed is that the concepts of traffic reporting and mission-critical micro-blogging contain some over-arching “big-picture” problems that are difficult to solve, especially as a small team like Zenji. Global traffic reporting over a limited proprietary service is complicated. So to solve these problems, Zenji is preparing a few open projects to see if we can get the open source community involved in helping out. These big-picture solutions are what we’re forming as “Zenji Open Projects“.