DIYtraffic, DIYcity's first application, now live

I'm excited to announce that DIYcity's first app, DIYtraffic, is now live and running for 3 cities, and the source code is available for download by anyone who wants to set it up for other cities.

The app was built to be easily configurable for any city in the U.S (or any city in the world, provided there's an RSS feed for traffic updates to be found).

This beta version of the app, when configured, does the following:

- posts all traffic incidents for the city in question to a Twitter feed, allowing users to receive these traffic alerts as SMS messages to their phone if they want
- accepts queries from followers on specific streets, and returns traffic info for just that street
- accepts user-generated traffic alerts for the city and reposts those to the feed.

There are lots of other useful things it could do as well, but we figured this was a good start.

DIYtraffic emerged out of a discussion held on the site about using Twitter to alert people to traffic problems. As the first app created here, it's a proof of concept for the idea of DIYcity as a place where conversation about applications can turn into actual applications, able to be used by anyone. As exciting as it is to see DIYtraffic launch, it is doubly so to see that proof of concept happen.

Anyway, check out the full explanation, with running examples, links to the source code, and instructions on how to use it here: http://diycity.org/diytraffic-realtime-traffic-alerts

And follow the DIYtraffic feed in your town!

Kudos to Dan Greenblatt for pushing this through and making it happen.