FuelTweet – A Twitter application sharing cheap fuel prices
Introducing Fueltweet, a new Twitter application you can talk to, it’ll tell you the best Petrol or Diesel price in your area.
If you want to know the cheapest spot to fill up in Bishopstown forexample, tweet “@petroltweet Bishopstown” or “@dieseltweet Bishopstown” depending on wether you are looking for Petrol or Diesel prices. It will respond to you a few seconds later with the most up to date and best price it knows in that area.
Its early days for this application so it may not know any prices in your area. It needs to be kept up to date too with current prices so keep it up to date if you can while on your travels. Heres an example of telling the application about the price of petrol in a Texaco garage in Bishopstown; “@petroltweet Texaco in Bishopstown 124.9”.
Cork Open Coffee
Like a lot of great ideas, the idea for this Twitter app came from Corks Open Coffee. John Peavoy and I chatted about the concept and agreed that it would be a useful App. I began using the Twitter API to play around with functionality and create the app. The look and feel, and the input syntax is still evolving, so please give your feedback, good or bad, on how it works.
We have a new site up and running to promote the application, to show people how to use it and to show the best and average Petrol & Diesel prices around at the moment, http://www.fueltweet.com. Its a great design from John Sheahan of Egg Design, a new regular of Cork Open Coffee.
If you have any feedback on the application, whether about the use of it or the information contained within it, please let me know. There are plenty of features coming very soon, the plan is to keep it simple and to give the user information quickly.
Pumps.ie API
Another site Pumps.ie, created by Jonathan Dean has been around for a few years with a great range of fuel pricing data and locations. Jonathan has been good enough to give us early access to their upcoming API so that we will be able to swap information between Fueltweet and Pumps.ie. Check out their free pumps.ie iPhone app too in the iTunes store.
Thank you to all the users on Twitter who have been sending in updated fuel prices so far, keep it up - this is a public service and will become stronger and more useful as you use it more and input more information. Finally, I hope you’re not Tweeting while driving - keep safe and only tweet when you’re stopped and it is safe to do so!
Great idea! Just a few observations and suggestions…
1. You can query prices just using search.twitter.com. For example, to see the petrol prices for Ballincollig since the weekend, you can just use a search string like:
“in Ballincollig” to:petroltweet since:2010-02-07
Sure, this might seem clunky at first and something for the power user. But it has a big advantage in that many Twitter clients let you save a search string for quick recall, i.e. people could get the latest price for their area in just a click or two.
2. If you introduced the concept of trusted price contributors (initially perhaps just by manually approving particular users, later by way of a web of trust) then you could automatically tweet (or possibly retweet) new prices from trusted contributors. This would allow people to see ‘quality assured’ prices as well as any old crap somebody might tweet at you. Or perhaps the trust concept should work in reverse, i.e. everyone is trusted unless you blacklist them.
3. You could very quickly put together a little widget (still using the Twitter infrastructure - not directly updating your database) that would enable people to contribute and query prices. Using a widget would have all sort of benefits. Most obviously, it would enable you to pre-populate lists with all the petrol stations and towns. Also, it would enable you to have greater structure on price update tweets. For example you could add hashtags or a geotag to more accurately describe the location (what happens now if you have prices for Dundrum in Dublin and Dundrum in Tipp?).
4. A map would be cool…
Just to let you know, there’s a little buglet in the parsing. I tweeted “@petroltweet Texaco in South Douglas Road is 126.9″ and the little grid of latest prices on the website is showing the location as “South Douglas Road is”.
Hi David,
Nice one for the feedback, thats what I was hoping for.
I didn’t know about those Search parameters, Thanks for that.
We plan to add price validation or approval, so users can give a price a ‘Thumbs up’ or a verified vote if more that one person sends it in or can verify it on the site.
I thought about putting a form on the main website where people might submit prices there. We decided against it though, just to keep it to Twitter as it was initally designed. There are bugs in the parsing as you can see so the plan is to fix these up, allow for a couple of different syntax approaches and just do this stuff well rather than branching it out to Widgets.
Thanks for submitting prices, I have fixed that Douglas road input directly in the database, I’ll update the code to parse the input.