Jon Camfield

Thinking about tomorrow’s threats against human rights and Internet Freedom. Frustrated Optimist, gardener, salsa dancer, cook, husband, dad, embarrassed Texan. Opinions here are my own. he/they.

2 minute read

So coming up on 25th-28th of April is the 20th annual Global Youth Service Day, and I'm trying to see if I can do something fun with Twitter; like having youth from around the world send short SMS updates about their projects. I'm looking at various ways to include others without risking problems of needing to monitor the account for inappropriate content and so forth, so SMS-style JOIN GYSDs, #tags, TwitterMail, and so on.

In researching these options I've been looking at other event and automated Twitters; where you have things like the Bonnaroo twitter with lots of activity, and the SXSW twitter with lots of followers, so their "with others" pages is rich, but all of one update "from" the SXSW account.


Nothing nothing nothing, all the way downMy favorite is Washington DC’s own Metro service update feed – eleven thousand updates and counting, a new one every half hour, announcing over and over and over again to all five followers; “There are no Metrorail service alerts at this time.”

I applaud WMATA for having a twitter feed, but how about you remove the constant stream of EVERYTHING IS OK announcements and replace it with one update after the most recent interruption clears? You might get more than 5 followers then...