Great Western Coffee Shop

I'm experimenting with a new twitter feed - @PassengerForum - to be automatically updated as people post to the public (guest viewable) boards.

Please start to follow @PassengerForum and let others know about it too - this feed's come about as a result of user request, and my need to understand the new Twitter API for posting statuses onto a feed.   It means that occasional visitors here can have a quick summary come to them - usually within half an hour of a message being posted, and complete with a link to the page on which the new message is posted.

See profile of the new feed (and whether you think I've chosen appropriate images!) at https://twitter.com/PassengerForum

grahame.

Should this feed/link not be a little more area specific? If linking to the Great Western Passengers' Forum (aka Great Western Coffee Shop) then @PassengerForum may be a little too generic.

Passing comment from someone who uses Twitter but sparingly, so I could be way off the mark, but I think I've got a handle on what makes a good address and/or hash tag. I think the words 'Great' and 'Western' need to be in there somewhere.

Changed of course in future years when National Express win the franchise and decide to go with a bonkers name.

To paraphrase Jim Royle. "One? My ar*e."

But how to get "Thames Valley, South West England and South Wales" into the handle?  I can tinker around with the description (and will probably do so) ... I'm not sure I want the / a company name in there, though. With "First Great Western Coffee Shop", every page comes complete with a disclaimer that we are talking about the company / franchise, and there's no room for such a disclaimer in a tweet or twitter handle.

I considered (and did not go for) running a series of feeds, board by board or area by area.  As it was in my testing I found myself being too aggressive and getting a ticking off from Twitter ...

Please pardon me if I'm missing the obvious, but could the feed not be called '@GreatWesternPassengerForum', simply reflecting the name of the franchise, rather than First Great Western as the current franchisee?  :P

The problem with Twitter names is they are limited to 15 characters.  It makes sense when you think of people sending you messages and having to quote your username as it would eat into the 140 character message limit.

How about @GWPassengers

Thanks for the inputs.  The initial purpose of the feed is (a) to produce an outward facing feed that occasional members who are twitter users can follow to get a summary of what's going on and (b) to help me learn the Twitter API version 1.1 which is documented, but its hard to find exactly the bits you need at times and work out a procedure for setting something like this us.  For both of those, the name isn't critical.

Looking ahead, though, where are we headed?  We're looking more and more at integrated transport and complete journeys ... and so I wanted to use a feed name that doesn't imply a limit purely to train, nor purely to a particular franchise / company.  And there's also more of an issue using part or all of a company / franchise name on a twitter account name than on the forum; every forum page includes a disclaimer that the site is not run by First Great Western, and there's no way that can be included within the 140 characters.

There you are, then: I was indeed missing the bleedin' obvious.  :-[ ::) ;D

Not really - I only found that out six months ago!  ;D

I am follower #13 @Nympton

& ' < and > characters have various special meanings in HTML ... this post is purely a test to see if I've managed to fix an undocumented and unintended feature which caused them to display incorrectly in early "spike solution" testing of this twitter feed. 

And " fixed too ...

Further testing

The sheer volume of tweets is just making it impossible to follow any other meaningfully. So the twitter feed is of no use to me.

Agreed there are too many tweets. They've taken over my feed on a very grand scale. I have even accessed the forum from a mobile device for the first time!

That is a bit of a fringe disbenefit, I agree. E-mail notifications stop until you visit the site itself - is that an option available with Twitter?

I'm feeding the subject of all new public posts, and the start (excluding quotes) of follow ups ... but that's just an initial test and the feed is tailorable based on what's best for people.

At present, you'll see around 60 messages per day.   What could be different:

New subjects only - that would drop to 5 to 7 messages per day. The disadvantage is that strong running subjects simply wouldn't appear

Selection on a per-board basis.  That could drop traffic to just about any level - "ad absurdum" just tweet about Reading to Basingstoke, and you may see one tweet per week.  The problem here is everyone will want different board selected and that would mean lots of separate feeds.   Lots of work, not sure about twitter's policy on that.  Some sort of grouping may be possible.

Content-related tweets. "Only tweet is there's a substantial quantity of unquoted text" or similar rules.  Would miss "breaking news" headlines.

Limit per-thread tweeting to initial topic that at most (say) two tweets a day.  Gives stale updates, artificially selective, harder to code.

As you'll see, I've not come up with anything that I thinks's going to be ideal for most followers based on the initial comments already made.   Other suggestions gratefully received - depending on how that goes, I many go ahead with one idea or another, I may put it to a vote, I may fine-tune what we have at present, or I may let the thing quietly slip away and describe it as a "learning experience", which it has been already.

I open the floor to comments ...

I'd like the idea of a "new topic" tweet.  I can keep up to date with existing topics via the email notifications.

I know you can asked to be emailed about new topics but a tweet would draw my attention more and not be diluted by a barrage of other tweets regarding existing topics which don't interest me so much that I need to look straight away.

I like the above one. That or @GWForum

Great Western is the term used by the DfT/NR and other to describe the route (regardless of TOC), so I think it is a pretty safe long term name.

As a long term Twitter user, one piece of advice I would dispense is that there needs to be some kind of post limit because otherwise you may end up with your account in Twitter jail for suspected SPAM (as sometimes happens with NRE/TOC Tweets).

I am experimenting with @GWPassengers ... new topics only.   Also pulling back on @Passengerforum though I think we're quite a long way short of jail.    The idea is that follow ups will go to @Passengerforum so that there's no duplication.

The following feeds should now be available from the forum:

@gwpassengers - which announces all new public threads (subjects now starting re:)
- short messages - just the title and a link to the post
- typically around 5 or 6 tweets per day

@passengerforum - all follow ups to public threads
- subject, and the start of the content (excluding quoted sections)
- typically this feed will tweet 3 or 4 times an hour at busy periods

Messages should not tweet on both feeds, so you will not get duplication if you take them both

Each post includes a short URL link to the thread

We have a few boards such as "frequent posters club" and "the rumour mill" which are available only to established members who have posted a certain number of times or more, these boards are not available via twitter.

I've got used to it now, and like it. A quick scan of the tweets is quicker than any other way of hearing about current hot topics, and it doesn't really flood the Twitter stream.

Leave it as is.

It's staying as it is ... almost. I have registered another short URL and have switched to using that.    This post is really just a test to make sure I've gotten it right!