TrafficTweet Brings Twitter on the Road
After reading our post earlier this week about five mobile applications aimed at making your commute less hectic, the folks over at Washington, D.C.-based Mobomo emailed us about their latest location-based app for the iPhone, TrafficTweet, which publicly launches today.
The app harnesses the real-time power of Twitter and crowd-sourcing by letting drivers tweet about traffic conditions, road closures and speed traps to other TrafficTweet users with just a couple of clicks on their iPhone. The information drivers send through their tweets is used to update the interactive map within the application (which is available for 99 cents) in real time, so it gets better as more people use it. While TrafficTweet joins a string of mobile apps made for the road, it’s uncertain whether developers will be able to make money off these clever applications — especially since many of them are free. Developers will have to sell tens of millions of these apps to make a profit. Though the iPhone — one of the leaders of the smartphone market — sold a whopping 11.4 million devices last year,those impressive sales numbers still aren’t enough to fill developers’ coffers. To break even, developers will have to come up with innovative ways to monetize their apps. More importantly, they need to quickly develop versions of the apps for other smartphone platforms such as Google’s Android, Palm’s webOS, Symbian and BlackBerry.
Although smartphone sales are expected to remain strong over the next four years, we have a vague picture of which app developers will actually grow their revenue and become profitable, and which won’t make enough cash to survive.
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Images courtesy of Mobomo and iSmashPhone.
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Will it also point out those crashes this app causes because people were tweeting instead of driving?
It’s a self-regenerating application – it ensures event creation for its own survival ;-)
This application should be illegal… Driving and Tweeting should be illegal.
Then by that logic, cell phones should be illegal. There are a lot more of them than there will be iPhones running TrafficTweet, and I think it’s safe to say cell phones in general cause a lot more accidents than specific apps. What about radios/stereos? That could be distracting, too. Or beverages? Opening lids and spills provide distraction as well. My driving instructor told me that the only way to truly maximize your attention is to drive, alone, in silence, without any food or beverages.
Think of this: if traffic is bad, you’re going to be spending a lot of time at a standstill, so why not let others avoid the same problem? If you’re stopped, it wouldn’t take long to start the app and then press your finger down a couple of times to post the traffic conditions. Even if traffic is better, red lights would provide more than enough time to use the app quickly.
It’s easy to just declare that something should be illegal because it can be misused, but much harder to then make distinctions. Yes, driving and talking on the phone/texting/tweeting should probably be illegal. But you don’t make the device itself illegal because people might misuse it.
When you’re stopped in traffic, you still shouldn’t be tweeting. You should be looking in the mirror to see if someone else is driving distracted and is about to rear-end you so you can try to get out the way!
Dialing manually and tweeting are much worse than the other examples given here. It is one thing to eat, sip, voice dial and talk, etc where you generally don’t need to de-focus your eyes from what is outside the car. You’re distracted but not the way you are when you have to focus on a small screen or dial pad visually.
In 30 years or so of driving I’ve hardly ever had to take action to avoid someone having a soda or munching on some fries. I have to do that a few times a month from people operating smartphones or trying to manually dial while driving these days.
Stacey wrote earlier about how congress is seeking to ban texting across all 50 states: http://gigaom.com/2009/07/29/congress-to-seek-ban-on-txting-whl-drvng/
I wonder if they’ll turn to banning tweeting next. What do you think?