blog

Social Networking to the Rescue

by Anu

It's a nasty, cold Saturday in Brooklyn. A friend is visiting us and needs to visit someone in Queens. She has already had a difficult trip to us from Midtown Manhattan due to "some delay" with the subway at Chambers Street. As she readies to brave the weather, my wife offers, "Anu can look on-line and see if there are any delays."

In the old world, my search focus would have been on the mta.info site.

But in today's world, my search led me to Twitter. The introduction of child 3.0 in our household further knocked off some leisurely pursuits (don't worry - the beer is carbonating and the bread mother is alive), one of which was exploring random, fun sections of the World Wide Web.

So I'm a relative newcomer to Twitter.

I found a Tweet to "follow" that sounded promising. I "followed" it (that means to get updates when a new tweet is posted) and saw that the "some delay" at Chambers was due to "smoke on the tracks." And just 7 minutes ago, someone posted that the Lexington lines were running slow due to a sick passenger. I was able to re-direct her and save somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes from her trip.

Just because I'm curious, I went back to the mta.info site to look for service advisories. Last one posted: Wednesday! Score 1 for the power of the human network.