Courtesy of: CreditDonkey

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Courtesy of CreditDonkey

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What is Skuzme?

Skuzme is a simple way to connect with other commuters going the same way you are. Combining crowd-sourced traffic alerts and social sharing, with traffic alerts from service providers and other social networks, we’ve made it easy to make better trip choices. The next time your transport service provider doesn’t give you the full picture about a delay, commute social with Skuzme and make the best alternative trip choice to get you there safely. Skuzme empowers you to help create safer, sustainable and convenient transportation choices. Socially, we can make better transport choices.

Why Skuzme?

Its the only social network where you can define your commute around any combination of modes; light rail, commuter train, bus, ride share, car pool, ferry, park ‘n rides, commercial airlines, freight deliveries, even your own solo commute. Skuzme is the only social network where you can send traffic alerts directly to the friends and followers of a transportation service, immediately, un-edited. And, it’s one of the only networks where the users regulate the quality of the data and information.

How does it work?

Skuzme offers two types of user accounts.  One for COMMUTERS and one for the SERVICE(s) they commute.  Social sharing among COMMUTERS who use the same SERVICE(s) is what is at the core of what makes Skuzme work.  We use it to supplement and strengthen officially sourced travel information and data.   The more the users interact, the richer the experience.  Skuzme’s traffic SkuzeAlert, a unique “crowd-sourcing” tool, lets commuters send travel alerts directly to other commuters who have an interest in the same commute patterns, and the transport providers serving them. In short, the SkuzAlert solves a fundamental problem with conventional social networks - read more.

Why does it work?

Traffic, transit and flight information for the commuter, by the commuter. Commuters are the best source for transit, traffic and flight information. They provide the best up to the minute information when freeways come to a standstill, trains run late, buses are slow, and flights are cancelled. Our approach leverages social interaction and trust to deliver the best information for commuters. The notion is that internet oriented  social sharing and networking is a powerful and credible basis for influencing commuters’ transport mode, route and service choices, and ultimately the quality of transport services.

What makes Skuzme different?

Skuzme is focused on the user’s experience:

·        Traffic data is crowd-sourced directly from commuters - read more.

·        Users are able to customize transportation Services around their commutes – read more.

·        The user is able to regulate the quality of alerts and advisories by reducing spamming – read more.

What are Skuzme’s data sources?

Skuzme offers three sources for travel alerts and advisories:

1.     External Feeds - Traffic, transit and airline alerts are sourced from external RSS feeds provided by the transportation service providers.  Alerts from one or more service provider are “pushed” to the followers of a SERVICE representing their commute on Skuzme – read more.

2.    Commuter Crowd Sourcing - Real time alerts are crowd-sourced from COMMUTERS who send their own traffic and transit SkuzAlerts directly to a SERVICE.  These alerts are self-moderated and blended with the “official” alerts - read more.

3.    Social Sharing - Commuters with similar travel patterns connect and follow each other. They share their own transportation experiences and choices with their followers through  SkuzAll status updates and SkuzDirect messages - read more.

Integrated with other Social Networks?

·        Facebook – Skuzme allows you to register and/or login with your Facebook account.  You can also share traffic alerts with your Facebook friends and recommend commuter services for your Facebook friends to follow.  [Coming soon> The Skuzme app on Facebook lets you receive Skuzme traffic alerts with your Facebook news feed, and post SkuzAlerts from Facebook to Skuzme.<Coming soon]

·        Twitter – You can share traffic alerts from Skuzme with your Twitter followers, as well as recommend recommend commuter services to your Twitter followers.  You can also access traffic alerts from a transport service provider’s Twitter account using RSS feed, and feed these into you commuter service account on Skuzme.

·        LinkedIn - You can share traffic alerts from Skuzme with your LinkedIn connections, as well as recommend recommend commuter services to your LinkedIn connections.

Read more – Commuters.

Read more - Services.

Read more – Relationships.

Read more - Sharing.

Read more - FAQs.

Click here to CommuteSocial with Skuzme!

Note:  This blog was posted to FB via and email sent to Posterous.  I was not logged into Posterous.  The Posterous app is able to post to FB without logging in to Posterous.

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We are moving into a new age of network commuting. Socially, that is.

What seems to drive the consumer's seemingly insatiable appetite for the mobile device, is not the device, but the media we access through the device.

Skuzme, a new so-called  "commute social" network, is a great example of the new age of social network commuting. It allows the commuter to become the new frontline on up-to-the-minute information about the transportation system. They provide the best up to the minute information when freeways come to a standstill, trains run late, buses are slow, and flights are cancelled. 

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The next time you’re riding your favorite transit service, driving your daily morning commute, boarding your weekly flight home, and you see something that may be useful for other commuters, use Skuzme to let them know.  

Skuzme connects commuters with commuters, and with better transport choices.  It’s a one-stop social network where commuters interact with each other, and with their favorite transport services.  

Commuting scocial with Skuzme solves a fundamental problem with other transportation advisory services on Twitter and Facebook. Commuters following a transportation service’s feed on Twitter or Facebook aren’t able to provide their own travel alerts or advisories to the service’s feed, even when they have valuable first-hand information to share!  

Skuzme solves this problem by crowd-sourcing alerts and advisories, known as SkuzAlerts, directly from commuters, passing them directly to the followers of the service, and giving riders the benefit of first hand and timely accounts of the service’s status.  

Skuzme is purely social. The more the users interact, the richer the experience. It uses social sharing to supplement and strengthen officially sourced travel information and data.  The notion is that internet oriented  social sharing and networking is a powerful and credible basis for influencing transportation mode, route and service choices, and ultimately the quality of transportation services.

Read more about Skuzme.

Click here to CommuteSocial with Skuzme!

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I was speaking today to the founders at Click and Pledge, a company that develops online fundraising solutions. We were talking about the perils of nurturing an IT start-up in a community other than the big-brand IT hubs like Silicon Valley, etc. Then I read something one of them wrote a while back. 

I hope you don't disagree with my BI & AI approach towards life, that is Before & After Internet. Before Internet our interactions were app-centric and after Internet they became browser-centric. Now thinking back and looking at the state of mobile world today it makes me wonder if we are going a full circle back into the app-centric world. What is going on? Have we forgotten all the problems we were having with apps? Updates, upgrades, bugs, installs, uninstalls, and re-installs! Frankly I think the answer is YES- we have forgotten the year 1 BI. I, for one, remember those days clearly and that is why I don't wish that for our clients & their patrons. At Click & Pledge we believe apps are not a practical solution for our clients and that is why we are designing everything around the browser. A browser-centric approach offers an immediate presence in the mobile world regardless of the device used. No apps to install, no apps to upgrade, and no apps to manage. via forums.clickandpledge.com

Good thing I read it.  We were about to give the go-ahead on the development of a whole suite of mobile phone apps for SKUZME, our beta transport centric social media networking service.  We were going to start with iPhone and Droid, and get to the others later. What I read got me thinking about something my friend Harry King told me several years ago, when I was pumping money into a Symbion app for the African market. Harry runs Indwe, a South African mobile solutions outfit focused exclusively on a browser centric MOBI platform. What he said echoes the strategy that the folks at Click and Pledge are following, that MOBI offers a cost effective, rapid and cross-platform presence in the mobile world.

Needless to say, we will be redirecting our mobile deployment strategy. 

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Phil Down has pledged to change his name to Phil Slow Down if the Facebook page setup to change the Australian town of Speed's name to Speedkills successfully gets 20,000 likes.  

The Victoria Transport Accident Commission (TAC) in Australia has launched a successful social media campaign to change the town of Speed's name to Speedkills.  Speeding is naturally an issue in Speed, as it is at a crossroads on the Sunraysia Highway.

The 'Like' us to rename Speed  page has over 17,000 likes, and so the name will be changed (the target was 10,000).  Stay tuned to the page to see if Phil will have to change his name too.

Oh, there's also a Like if you think changing the name of Speed to Speedkills is pointless page, with a mere 312 likes.   

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Via: OnlineSchools.org

Full story on Mashable

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"School children and the young-at-heart in the Southeast reveled as a winter storm bore down on the region late last weekend. On Monday, the snow and ice walloped a zone from Alabama and Tennessee into the Carolinas, bringing travel to a standstill and leaving thousands without power." via accuweather.com

What did you do to navigate the storm?  

Did you use any form of social media like Twitter of Facebook to stay abreast on the weather? 

How about wintry traffic and road conditions?

What did transportation agencies do to keep local travelers informed?

Give us your feedback. 

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It's already been predicted, that society is going to be enormously shaped by the degree to which individuals and organizations embrace social media (SoMe). And history gives us solid evidence. The impact of transportation on society throughout the twentieth century provides us with hard insight into the degree and extent this is going to occur.  

The degree to which traffic in our neighborhoods has impacted social behavior and interaction gives us a crystal ball into the way social media is likely to shape who we become over the coming decade.  

The Tie Between Social Media and a Livable Street

There is significant correlation between the "livable" light traffic street and SoMe.  Like SoMe, livable streets enable social interaction. In short, research into how people experience streets with different traffic volumes shows that people who live on low traffic "livable streets" are more social. The presence of traffic forms a physical barrier, limiting the degree to which social interaction evolves along a neighborhood block. 

But there is more to it than that.

1. Degree of Social Interaction - People living along livable streets know more people.  They have as much as three times as many friends as people who live on high traffic streets.  More social ties are created around a light traffic street (refer to the graphic below).
2. Territorial Reach (Influence) - The extent and reach of an individual's territory is far greater along a light traffic street. People living along heavy traffic streets limit the extent of their home territory to their home or building, whereas people along a light traffic street view the whole neighborhood block as their home territory.  
3. Environmental Awareness - The biggest insight is that people along livable streets are more aware of their environment. They can picture their street in more detail; Specifics of building features, plants, sidewalks, etc. Whereas, people along busy streets are more ambiguous about their environment.  They carry a hazy picture of what their neighborhood looks like.    

This image shows the social interaction on three similar streets with different traffic levels.  The lines show the connections between people living along the respective streets.  The graphical evidence of the various degrees of social interaction is astounding.  

How Does This Give Us a View of the Future?

The hard evidence that the amount of traffic on a street can impact one's social evolution in the modern world is significant. It provides us with enormous insight into how our digital societies are going to evolve.  As digital communities start to explode, people and organizations who are in a position to embrace SoMe, are going to be shaped differently than people who are in less of a position to do so.

They are going to:

• Have more connections, either social or interest based (Naval Ravikant and Adam Rifkin);
• Cast a wider reach or influence across society; and,
• Be more aware of who they are, and the environment they create.   

Why are These Findings Key?

Much of the buzz about SoMe, and how it is impacting society is based on expert insights and best guesses. Most of us, even the experts, are flying by the seats of our pants. Time/CNN naming Mark Zuckerburg  Person of the Year 2010,  and Goldman's recently announced deal with Facebook, are reactive symptoms of SoMe's impact, not actual insight.

History, on the other hand, gives us insightful hindsight. Specifically, the history of how traffic has impacted society gives us a solid foot to stand on as we enter this new decade. These traffic findings can potentially provide a basis for how governments, businesses, NGOs and individuals should think about their approach to SoMe.  

This blog merely scratches the surface on the subject. There is much more to be learned and taken from the livable streets analogy. And there is more to come of it. We welcome any feedback, insights and different takes on the research.   

More About the "Livable Streets" Research

The work was conducted on three similar streets in San Fransisco by Professor Donald Appleyard, and published as "Livable Streets" in 1981. His work is being reintroduced as part of the Livable Streets Initiative, an online community for people working to create sustainable cities through sensible urban planning, design, and transportation policy. His son, Bruce Appleyard is in the process of republishing the Livable Streets book, which is due out August 2011. Interestingly, he begins to address the issue of propinquity - physical proximity, a kinship between people, or a similarity in nature between things  - in neighboring on page 4 of the Introduction to the new book.

This video, produced by Streetfilms.org,  provides a great overview of the research findings.  

Note: The image used in this blog is a frame taken from the video.  

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America's hopes for high speed rail (HSR) took a roller coaster ride in 2010.  From the highs in January when Congress and the Administration announced the news of billions in Federal funding for a national network of HSR corridors.  To the lows in November and December, particularly for the states that lost their funding after the 2010 mid-term elections, due to a change in political support at the local and state levels.   

As a result, HSR became the No. 1 transportation story in America, according to The Infrastructurist. And almost as hot as America's HSR ups and downs, was China's burgeoning HSR empire.

Did You Know? HSR. Shift Happens.

Social media chatter about transportation is High on Speed Rail.  What's the story?

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We are looking for nominees as social media mavericks, icons or "SMidols" in the transportation sector.  Which organization in the transportation field, or persons representing an organization in the transportation field, is doing the best job in terms of engaging their customers? 

As a guideline, use measures like:

1) The size of their communities on Twitter or Facebook.

2) The richness of their engagement process, in terms of the cross-section of media used.  What combination of blogs, social networks, videos and streaming video, etc, are they using?

3) The degree to which they embrace and engage community feedback.  Do they allow the audience to communicate back?  Do they actively engage with their community?

Here are some examples:

Ted Nguyen

Ray LaHood

BART

Give us your feedback!

Nominate a SMIT - Social Media Icon in Transportation!  

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Getting around on public transportation has its benefits. For many Americans, it's an essential part of their daily lives. However, for most commuters, it plays second fiddle to the car, and it's likely not because transit is hard to navigate on.

Thanks to some social media applications, using public transit is becoming easier for the infrequent user. Getting around on public transport is becoming less difficult, especially when it comes figuring out the routes and schedules. For instance, local transit agencies are tapping into Google Maps'  "get directions" feature to help commuters pick a route and schedule.  The Google application allows the user options for a variety of modes - car, transit, bike and walking.

Another social media application is HopStop which has made riding the bus or subway, or even walking, easier in America and Europe's biggest and more transit friendly cities. 

The Clever Commute is an e-mail based traffic and traveler information exchange among fellow riders to help each other avoid delays and make mode choices. The information is shared on a timely basis among people making the same trip/route.  In addition to choosing an alternative route, commuters can use the information to make a mode shift decisions to avoid delays from traffic congestion. 

Not least are the transit agencies themselves, which are increasingly embracing social media as a way to engage their customers.  BART  in San Fransisco is one of the leaders. They use You Tube videos, streaming videos, Facebook, Twitter and Posterous, and other tools, to take their news and information directly to the riders, and to allow the riders to share their experiences. They have also opened their web interface to outside developers, allowing them to integrate BART's data into third party applications.   

Social media makes public transit more accessible and user friendly for the commuting population. 

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Ridesharing allows commuters to combine driving their car or participate in a carpool with other modes of public transportation. We all know about the benefits of ridesharing - it reduces traffic, emissions, and saves you gas money. But for all its benefits, it can also have its drawbacks. For one, you can't always choose who you ride with.

But social media networks can help you solve that problem. Social network applications like Zimride  offer commuters with greater options and choices. They offer a critical mass of commuters with similar goals in mind - share rides, save money and reduce their carbon footprint.  

Web 2.0 social media's ability to create critical mass is a powerful value proposition for making good alternative transport choices.   

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Search-driven referrals still rule the internet.  But social-driven are closing the gap on search engines as the leading source of referrals.  What's more is, social-driven referrals carry more loyalty and yield more page views than search-driven referrals. 

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The agencies responsible for providing public transportation systems and services are increasingly using social media as a means for engaging their customers. Earlier in 2010, the Federal Transit Administration (FTA)  and the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (AASHTO) took a look at the degree to which their member agencies using social media (SM), and published the following reports.

Here is a summary of how SM is being used:

• Using You Tube videos, streaming video, opted e-mail accounts, Facebook and Twitter to communicate directly with the public.
• Using Twitter to report traffic and systems information.  
• They publish clear clear guidelines for communications to keep the dialog appropriate.  
• Pro-actively disseminate their own information before others can mis-inform
• Use SM to save money on traditional/legacy communications services and methods.
• Challenges: Institutional resistances, funding, learning new tools, staff resources (development and maintenance).    

 Use of Social Media in Public Transit - The FTA funded a video that looks at several case studies in the transit sector.   

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There seems to be a never-ending array of social media sites and applications. The following is a shortlist.  There are many others, of course. What's your social media?

1. Blogs

(Long-form) Wordpress,  TypePad, Blogger

(Mini) Posterous, Tumblr

(Micro or Short-form) Twitter, Plurk

(Subject specific) Squidoo

2. Social/Professional Networking

(Social) Facebook, MySpace, Friendster

(Professional) LinkedIn, Plaxo

3. Social Bookmarking

Del.ici.ous, Diigo, StumbleUpon

4. Rich Media Sharing

(Video) YouTube, Vimeo

(Photo) Flickr, PhotoBucket

(Presentations) SlideShare

5. Social Email

Google Buzz

6. Comment Communities

Disqus

7. Podcasting Communities

Blubrry

8. Blog Networks & Communities

Gawker, b5Media, 9Rules, BlogHer, LiveJournal

9. Content-driven Communities

Wikipedia

10. Product-based Communities

Ebay, Amazon

11. Review & Recommendation

Shelfari, TripAdvisor, Lonely Planet, Where I’ve Been

12. Discounteering

Groupon

13. Social News

Digg, PopURLs

14. Social Measuring

Technorati, BlogPulse

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