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Traffic in the Bible Belt

Submitted by mop.scotch on 19 November 2008 - 12:26am to Discussions.

I live in the Bible Belt, Texas to be specific. I live in College Station (home of Texas A&M University- great at engineering and some other sciences), but College Station isn't as large as some of the other cities here on DIYcity so I've had a tough time thinking of any traffic related issues. However, it is big enough to notice a giant leap in traffic on Sundays when church gets out- I think the development of twitter bots for various cities in the Bible Belt could definitely be useful. Basically you setup a way for churches to signal the bot that their service is over, thereby letting everyone following the bot know that traffic is about to spike. While services all take place in the same general time frame (Sunday morning till lunch), they never end at exactly the same time, and most churches run different schedules. It would definitely be a huge time killer to run into Joel Olsteen's congregation of 30,000 on the way to lunch or on the way out of town. If you live in the Bible Belt (assuming you don't have this problem if you don't- maybe you do?) what do you think about this idea? Got any other ideas?

19 Nov22:29

re: Bible Belt Bots

By John Geraci

mop.scotch - According to DIYcity user whitneymcn, who I believe actually built the ShakeShack Bot (someone correct me if I'm wrong on that), Twitterbots are really easy to set up. You should set one up and test it out.

Maybe Whit could do a demo on how to make Twitterbots on DIYcity?

Questions for you:

Are people in that area using Twitter?

How could you get the word out to people about the bot, so people would know to use it?

20 Nov21:52

Seems like it could be perfect for Twitter

By whitneymcn

I think you're right on with the twitter bot idea, mop.scotch, and yep -- I put together the @shakeshack Twitter bot, along with a few others. Seems like a nice fit: with Twitter as a backbone for it you can get an SMS update as each church's service ends, so that even if you're mobile you'll get the traffic metadata you need.

The interesting problem is how to get the data in. Ideally you want exactly one update from each church, so ad hoc recruitment of Twittering churchgoers isn't ideal: you might have five people updating about one church and none from a different church.

In the best of all possible worlds you'd be able to have a button at each church that someone presses at the end of the service...maybe an amusing little hardware project for someone. :)

Even the ad hoc model could be a step forward, though. The code that runs @lotd and @shakeshack is up on my blog, so if you want to play around with it please do--I'm happy to offer advice if you start digging in to it.