I think my car needs a twitter account.
No really, if it did we could actually become a community of drivers and our cars could talk to each other. More importantly, my car could let other cars behind know of road conditions and of course – cops.
I have been considering how to make the cross country sprint – the cannon ball run. Those before me have made this in record time with the aid of advanced radar detectors, scramblers, laser fooling equipment and even an airplane.
I don’t have all that cash and finding sponsors for an illegal race seems like a an exercise in futility, but if my car had twitter – and a community around it, I think it could be done with none of the above.
To win this race against the clock – I need to maintain an avg speed of approx 90mph on the open intertstate. I am assuming that it would be best to attempt this with the most off peak highway hours as possible – drive mostly at night.
I will need to develop a gps aware device that updates my car’s twitter account fairly frequently to let followers (only the predefined and agreed upon ones) know where I am and avg speed.
If my car’s followers are willing to take on shifts that allow them to traverse set distances of the highway looking for police, wrecks, and construction- I will have realtime traffic information and highway clearance as I speed toward the goal.
Imagine this – my car dms a follower who is signed up for a region that I will be in that region in approx half an hour. My dear follower’s car will let me know that it is on the road and will dm my car if there is a slowing situation – cop, wreck, or construction. My car tweets me of the situation and I react accordingly. All this continues one after the other until my car reaches it’s destination. Unharmed and presumably unticketed.
Great for me. But imagine this on a larger scale – imagine hitting a button to let all the highway 81 followers know that there is a wreck in between mile marker 85 and 90.
Luckily most of us have that technology in our pockets – in the form of an android device, an iphone or any other gps aware cellular device.
The app to do this would be a simple interface that was allowed gps location and would follow other vehicles within the same radius on the same highway system 10 minutes ahead or 10 minutes behind automatically. The interface would have large buttons for easy to use while driving and would interpret the tweets of other vehicles with a direction and an icon indicating the status of the obstruction ahead.
blue with a Badge for cop
Red with a + for emergency
Grey with a cloud for poor weather
Orange with a cone for construction
The interface should prompt the user with a big button to confirm or deny the threat as they passed it. The more users that confirm the action the brighter or blinkier the icon becomes.
The more that deny, the lesser it becomes.
I love the badges on the flexexamples.com and was disappointed to see there was no online creator that did as good of a job. Being the lazy programmer that I am I am thinking it would be nice to create an air app that pulls the favicon and allows you to resize and position it (or select one from your HD), specify a bg color or gradient and save…
