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Carpooling with Twitter 3

While driving on the highway yesterday I had a thought. Wouldn’t it be nice if there weren’t so many cars on the road with so many empty seats?

Carpooling 

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily find someone heading to the same destination as you to carpool with? Well Twitter could be the tool that makes this a reality. Who would have guessed that twitter could help us reduce our impact on the environment?

Several friends have asked me what the point of twitter is and why should they care. I typically respond by telling them that twitter is a good tool to share little tidbits of information with people with common interests.

But Facebook already does all that”, they respond.

Facebook is useful for sharing information with people you already know, but Twitter makes it easy to share information with people you don’t know and you don’t need to expose personal information about yourself to your “followers”.

I find that twitter is currently good for exposing something interesting you’re doing, sharing details about a conference you’re attending, sharing an interesting article you just read, or sharing something interesting that you witnessed.

There are more useful applications of twitter that will surely surface in the future, and I think twitter would be a good candidate to coordinate carpooling.

Sure there are sites out there already dedicated to carpooling, such as carpool.ca or carpooltool.com or ride-share.com. But it would be much more convenient if for example, you tweet:

jamesschwartz Driving from Toronto to Montreal May 15th for the weekend #carpooling

Somebody else could do a search for “Toronto + Montreal + #carpooling” and they would see that I’m driving to Montreal (Don’t get too excited, I’m not actually driving to Montreal; this is just hypothetical).

It doesn’t get any more convenient than this; especially with twitter’s compatibility across hundreds of devices.

I did a quick search on twitter and at least one person has used twitter for this purpose:

quin_tessential: . out of town friend needs ride to SF from Hollywood this Sunday. Anyone down for a #carpooling with a cute Swede?”

There’s of course some risk involved in using twitter to find carpool partners, but you could use twitter to leave feedback on your carpooling partner in the form of a “tweet” so that other people can see your feedback. They would simply search for “@jamesschwartz #carpool” to see what others are saying about their experience carpooling with me.

There are many possible uses for twitter, and we’re sure to see its usefulness expand in the future as it evolves to become a more mature method of communication in today’s high tech world.

Photo courtesy of jerryjohn on Flickr

3 thoughts on “Carpooling with Twitter

  1. Chris R. Chapman May 11,2009 2:20 pm

    Indeed. What could possibly go wrong with a scheme like this?

    I mean, it’s worked out so well on CraigsList…

  2. Anonymous May 11,2009 7:01 pm

    This is a step backwards from structured information about from:x to:y (and not from:y to:x) … stored in a database for search… and autonotification if the schedule changes.

    I’m definitely not following hundreds of twitter messages to find somebody share a car.

  3. Rashedul Jun 11,2014 5:12 am

    From the article referenced in the blog post I understand
    that Spanish ticket prices are indeed very high, but the stadiums are generally
    not sold out. This begs the question if it really makes sense to invest in
    stadium development? I know Atletico and Valencia are already doing it, but it
    seems to have caused at least Valencia economical troubles. Montreal Carpooling

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