Due to lack of interest, I have stopped updating the iSubway files. Lack of interest was not the only reason for iSubway’s demise however. I was, as Joel Spolsky would say, eating my own dogfood so to speak. While the information was useful, keeping it updated on my iPod was kind of a pain. The problem with this sort of information is that it looses its relevance quite quickly. Carrying around two week old subway service advisories is not all that useful. Since the information did not update automatically it tended to go unrefreshed.
I still think that it would be great to have this information available in a more accessible way. For instance, it would be nice if the MTA made this information available via RSS. If an RSS feed were available, the information would be easier to access and all kinds of great stuff could be done with it. I wrote to the MTA about this and received a speedy response basically stating “we’ll think about it.” I’m not holding my breath.
But, just in case someone from the MTA website is reading this, here are a few things that could be done if you would provide an RSS feed:
- People could use their news aggregators to get updates
- Other websites could easily include this information (perhaps even WAP sites)
- Mobile devices could automatically sync this information