Oatmeal Stout – Justin Thorp’s blog

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Find Washington DC Metro Times via SMS

with 4 comments

Metro Times Screenshot

Washington DC programming rockstar Zvi Band has just launched a cool new Web app called Metro Times. It allows you to send a text message (SMS) with the name of a metro station to an address and it will send back to you the times of the upcoming trains. It’s awesome.

What’d make this app even better is if it were a mobile web app and not just for SMS.

This site provides essentially the same content as the iPhone Web app Meenster. Metro Times is great for those who are iPhone-less.

Written by Justin Thorp

October 28, 2007 at 1:28 pm

4 Responses

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  1. This is cool. Bart Solowiej built a similar tool a little while back: http://www.traincheck.com

    Zvi, you should connect with Bart as i’m sure you two will have something to talk about. facebook him and say Corbett gave you a heads up to reach out.

    Peter Corbett

    Peter Corbett

    October 28, 2007 at 2:00 pm

  2. Nice, but yeah, traincheck’s been offering SMS->email train times for a while. My LastCall service for DCist did the same through an all-SMS interface, although I had to shut it down after a while. It should be relaunching as a Twitter bot in the next week or two, though.

    Now if WMATA would just provide a bus-location API.

    Tom

    October 29, 2007 at 4:41 pm

  3. Thanks guys – I actually found out about TrainCheck long after initially writing metro times. Tom, I also saw LastCall, I’m sorry you had to shut it down!

    Zvi Band

    October 30, 2007 at 8:25 am

  4. [...] internet access!).  I have separate favorite links for the stations I use most often (thanks to Justin Thorp for this, though it works just fine without an [...]


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