While I know many readers of my blog are well versed in Twitter, I have been asked a common question and I think I would publicly answer it in a quick blog post.

The question was:

I have a question. I am following people and in their tweets, Sometimes I see @-reply’s from people in my timeline and sometimes I don’t.  I want to be able to see ALL of someone’s tweets, is there a way to do this?

~Anonymous

This is a great question, here is whats going on:

Unfortunately no.  Pretty much what Twitter has done is make it mandatory to be friends with the person who is being reply to. So if I am X and you are Y and some other person is Z, If I(X) tweet Z and you(Y) don’t know Z, then you would not see my(X) reply to Z. If you knew Z however, and I @-replied to him/her, then you would see my @-reply to Z in your(Y) time-line.

There used to be an option in your settings to change this, but they removed it (I believe) to help lower traffic and also to increase privacy in conversations on twitter in a, now that I think about it, odd way.

Google Fail

So I live in College Park, Maryland; which is directly on the North Western side of the infamous Beltway…and let me tell you: traffic is a bitch right outside of DC.

For those of you unfamiliar with the DC area, there is a single, unifying highway that loops completely around the metropolitan area of Washington and it is absolutely plagued (daily) with traffic.  It is, with out a doubt, one of the most traffic-prone highways in the country, and it can take up to an hour and a half just to travel 15 miles to my hometown of Rockville, Maryland.

Anyways, if duty, family or friends call and I need to head back west towards Rockville, I have taken it upon myself to check Google Maps for the traffic.  Google recently started collecting location data from people who use smartphones and have Google Maps installed.  When this geo-location data is cross referenced with location change over time gives Google the unique opportunity to display live traffic on their maps…or so they say.

Whats that you say? That sounds awesome! Well it would be, if the damn data was correct.

Tonight I took a short trip back to the Rockville area for a meeting that was scheduled to begin at around 7:30pm.  I figured, given no traffic, I would be able to venture home in about 30min MAX.  So I open up my browser and head over to maps.google.com, only to discover at about 7:00pm (optimal time for departure from College Park under ideal circumstances) that the entire route back is shaded in red.  Red = slow (or sometimes danger or stop…but this is irrelevant to this discussion).

Since according to Google Maps the traffic was bad and I had no time to waste, I decided to head out west anyway. And guess what? NO TRAFFIC.

I was in a green situation, not a red catastrophe like I was expecting.  After about 5 minutes on the highway, traversing many more miles than Google Maps predicted, I checked Google Maps on my Palm Pre.  Still red! Even in the area I was currently in.

So no, Google Maps can’t possibly have “live” traffic reporting.  I even restarted my phone just to see if it was a caching problem…but no, Google was just flat out wrong.

Google, take off the “live traffic” label on your maps.  I really rely on that to planning my schedule in a hectic traffic are of the country. Could you (Google) or anyone else provide a legitimate excuse for a misrepresentation like this? I can’t see one…and I am part of the Google Generation.  My contemporaries, at the very least, need to feel like they can rely on Google…and usually they deliver.  But no on this one.

I’d really like more in depth idea of how Google’s Live Traffic feature truly works, or the “Live” aspect of the system needs to be revised or removed. Gracias.

</end rant>