Saturday, October 31, 2009

Real time flight status…or not

After reading Mashable’s review of Lufthansa’s real time flight status update program, Myskystatus, I decided to try it out on my trip to Vietnam. The system posts status updates to Twitter and Facebook in real time and is pretty easy to use.

skystatus

However, it’s not real time, at least not in my case. You see, due to mechanical trouble, my Delta plane turned around and returned to Seattle after flying for 3 hours. Yet, the system kept sending updates that I was flying over Asia, even though I was sleeping in my bed. My suspicion is that Delta never updated the flight status, so Myskystatus kept reporting that I was in the air. In fact, I am writing this from home as I get ready to fly on United Airlines today. When I arrive in Vietnam (hopefully, tomorrow night), I will write about that post.

dl

Personally, after having seen the service in action, I don’t think I will use it again as it provides too much useless information for me.  My wife even thought I was spamming her.  I do think the usage of tools like Myskystatus for automated status updates to Twitter and Facebook will grow as we have a strong appetite for real time status and search. I just think it needs to be tempered with some discretion on how it is used and affects your friends and followers. What do you think would be some useful applications of real time status via Twitter?

 

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]