Transito Não! An experiment with Twitter, Traffic Jams and Ruby on Rails
Sunday, April 26th, 2009Twitter has become a great tool for social interaction, and it’s also gaining more authority than content in blogs.
Going even further, some people say it doesn’t matter how many followers you have on Twitter, but instead what matters is how many times your tweets get forwarded by those following you, showing that this person writes more valuable content, which deserves to be sent over to other people.
The project Trânsito Não! (which stands for “No To Traffic!”) is a social experiment with Twitter and a subject that gets everyone mad: the traffic jams. This web app cast tweets as ideas and/or votes, generating a public web space to debate on one of the most urgent problems of these days.
This project is aimed at the Brazilian people, specially those people living in the greater area of Sao Paulo, a region with about 17 million people experiencing one of the biggest car traffics in the world.
I developed this website with Ruby on Rails. This web framework offers great productivity to the developer. If you haven’t the chance yet, don’t miss this video showing a complete web blog written in only 15 minutes using Ruby on Rails.
The voting works like this: you tweet some idea or solution for the traffic problems, followed by the hashtag #transitonao. This tweet becomes a “idea” on TransitoNao website. If your tweet gets retweeded X times, these X times become votes for your idea. So the longer your idea spreads, the more votes you get. New tweets are read from the Twitter API every minute, being added to the database, and the pages being also refreshed (using page caching).
You can find me on my blog, Twitter, or at my personal email.