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Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least th
by progval 26d ago
Paris' subway and local train lines each have a Twitter account, and they are the only reliable source of information regarding outages. Phone apps (at least three official ones with different data sources!) and websites can be outdated. Displays in station too (though less often), have outages of their own, and (rarely) even incorrect updates.
- gloosx 26d agoWow, this is kind of a mess, seems twitter won from usability standpoint here
- freshpots 26d agoExcept that it doesn't because you need an account to see virtually anything on that N#*i site.
- gloosx 26d agoUsability for announcers, I meant. Seems it's easier for them to just post on twitter instead of having to deal with whatever interface their internal systems provide
- wlonkly 26d agoThe funny thing is that one reason that cities, utilities etc. keep posting on Twitter is that it's integrated into their internal systems (or at least to something like Hootsuite that handles multiple social platforms). I'd be very surprised if they're sharing a Twitter password.
- cancerkazoo 26d ago[flagged]
- johannes1234321 26d agoTwitter was in a great space for those kind of things. They had a big user base, a simple format and a working API, which was free for those kinds of things. Toolbuilders integrated it. No platform took over as clear successor. Of course such information should be on the operator's website as primary source ...
- antif 26d agoTwitter won by pulling the rug! They changed terms against their captive users and forced policy changes to end open publishing and firehose APIs—which the organization had once championed and enshrined.
- koyote 26d agoIt almost seems like we need laws that information about public services have to be available on a public website (as opposed to a third-party website that requires registration). I personally do not know anyone in real life with a twitter account (although I have one, I have not used it in over 15 years), I wonder how many people just go without this information and are angry that it's (seemingly) not available.
- deleted 26d ago[deleted]
- parineum 26d agoas much as I dislike when people proselytize mastodon, it seems like a very tidy solution to this problem.
- marcosdumay 26d agoAs long as the service provider runs an instance in their infrastructure and allows everybody to read. That said, RSS seems way simpler.
- parineum 26d agoI don't disagree and I'm not a mastodon user but, as far as I know, if you local gov hosted an instance and your state gov did too, you could, essentially, join both and see them together? RSS aggregation seems like the solution to me but I think we've got to admit defeat on that one because it's been around forever and people don't use it.
- cxr 26d agoPretty much every podcast in the world and all of their listeners are using RSS. WordPress powers something like 30% of the Web, and most of the operators behind those sites are publishing RSS whether they know it or not.
- mitxela 26d ago[dead]
- smcin 26d agoDoesn't their own Île-de-France Mobilités app have reliable information on outages? Surely it's more reliable than their Twitter account?
- trhaynes 26d agoFor me a website is much more accessible than a phone app in many situations.
- smcin 26d agoOk but can you answer my question about reliability?
- Implicated 26d agoI don't have a horse in this race but I would question the idea that a municipal service has a better reliability record than x/twitter.
- smcin 26d agoBut who is publishing the outage information to X/Twitter if not the utility itself? I'd be surprised if they do that more timely and reliably on a third-party platform than their own app. That's not the case for any European or US transit authorities I know. Can any other user of public transport in Paris comment?
- philipallstar 26d agoThe information may be as reliable, but: 1. the service may not be - every small provider has downtime, perhaps proportionally to their size. 2. the tools to update Twitter are well understood, and you can get software that does scheduling of posts across multiple platforms, previews of what posts will look like, etc etc, and said preview works well on the many platforms that people are already using. People doing the updating may prefer to use those tools over what the internal tool gives them.
- PennRobotics 26d agoIt's been a while since I've used Twitter, but I thought the tweet ordering was never chronological. Has this changed? You just have to trust that the algorithm will always surface relevant information to the top of the feed?