A lovely Mother’s Day weekend was spent in Victoria, BC to put some meat on the bones for the TinyApps team. In fact, TinyApps first start with a TinyHack, typically developed during #phptuesdays, however this weekend @joshuamckeny, @toddicus, @jessykate and @medido went straight to a TinyApp called Gas Tracker.
Gas Tracker is a Twitter hack which allows a follower to tweet basic gas usage information to gain a greater insight into ones driving habits.
For example, let’s assume that I am at the gas station to fill up my tank. It cost $47.43 for 14.23 gallons to fill your tank and my odo odometer reading is 74,345 miles. After I am following @gastracker I send it a direct message:
d gastracker $47.43 14.23g 74345
Over time, simple twitters to update your activity while at the pump will allow you to log in and visualize your driving behavior showing such graphs as rate of mileage accumulation and miles per gallon. We have some visions on how this will evolve with increased functionality, but in the spirit of TinyApps, we have to ship it to get some feedback.
Once you follow Gas Tracker on Twitter, you will receive a direct message welcoming you Gas Tracker and giving you instructions to go to the Gas Tracker Website. At the website, you will enter your Twitter name and Gas Tracker will direct tweet you a password. With this password, you’ll then be able log in and view your driving behavior. Do be patient, as the more data you input, the more meaningful the analysis will be.
Enjoy, and please do give us some feedback.
#1 by Mandell on 12May08 - 2:47 pm
Could this be used/extended to track personal vs. business use for your vehicle? Can it track usage for multiple vehicles? I’m picturing having text messages replace the tedious logging and calculations that I have to do every year for our two vehicles that we use for business and personal use, in addition to tracking the costs and efficiency of the vehicles.
#2 by Jesse Andrews on 12May08 - 3:10 pm
Twitter has a jabber/pub-sub feed of the public timeline so you can get all public utterances of the word “gas” (or something like that)
This looks pretty cool.
2 questions:
1) can you bind two twitter accounts – so my wife and I can both update a single “account”, since whoever is driving will probably add gas if it is running low
2) can you have “Tags” or something so that I can track my scooter separately than my car
#3 by admin on 13May08 - 1:46 am
We’ve actually already got support for multiple vehicles, but the UI was really ugly so we left it off for the launch. Yes, and TAGS too – using the #tag syntax most twits are fond of.
Yes, vehicles can be shared by users (at least in the data model), and the data graphed per vehicle instead of per user.
I like the pub-sub feed for public “gas” idea – we’re also going to make sure that gastracker can handle @replies as well as direct messages, so that people can keep it public if they want.
A question for you – we’ve thought of using Amazon Mechanical Turk to process simple cell-phone snapshots of the odometer / gas pump, but figured it didn’t really save the user any time. What do you think?