San Diego is 53ing Los Angeles' Big Ass!

Vorsprung Durch Tweetnik   

I love Audi. They make my insides go all warm and fuzzily. I love them because they always do The Right Thing®. They are clever, they are smart and sometimes they are a bit mad. And today, they have become Kings of social media!

Audi have developed a webpage that tells you where the worst traffic is. It tells you how frustrated you will be if you travel to this area, how long you will be delayed, the current weather and in more precise detail than any traffic news report could ever hope to achieve. And most of this information is automatically sourced without the need for a German hand to push a button, flick a switch or speak into a microphone over the noise of helicopter rotor blades.

How have they done this? With Twitter!

Those clever bastards have developed a way of looking at Twitter's collosal firehose of tweets, singling out the ones that are from the USA, then filtering those for information about the roads or traffic. The more road rage in your tweet, the more likely you will affect the "Frustration-o-meter".

Audi then cleverly takes the Geotag information from the tweet (your location), and then compiles and processes all the tweets from the same city.

Then, they display it all in a nice, clickable, interactive way; starting off with a map, and then letting you click to drill into information about particular cities. Brilliantly, the information can be filtered further for "weather", "traffic" and (incredibly) "sentiment", which shows an indication of how people feel about the city they are driving through.

It is quite amazing. You can see Audi's EPIC social WIN for yourself at:

http://www.roadintel.com/.

The Science Bit

I'd love to say that it was all lovely cutting-edge HTML5 and ECMAScript5, but it's not. The clever bastards have decided to use Transitional XHTML1 so that more users (not just the ones with up-to-date browsers!) can enjoy their clever bastardness.

Clever bastards.