Feasibility analysis of transportation applications based on APIs of social network services

With increasing ownership of smartphones and membership of various social network services (SNS), new types of Advanced Traveler Information Systems (ATIS) has become available to travelers. The smartphone enables mobile users to input and access real-time information while SNSs provide voluntarily collected personal information among networks of friends. Internet of Things (IoT) philosophy can be applied for connecting smartphone users for various transportation applications. This paper develops Facebook-based carpooling, and proposes Twitter-based traffic monitoring and Flickr-based incident reporting applications. The SNS services provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow external users to access their databases. The APIs provide a basis for the development of transportation applications for each service. Facebook can allow a group of friends to share a ride based on their attributes which are available in their personal information sections. Twitter can be used for sharing traffic conditions on the roads. Flickr can be customized as a geo-tagged collision reporting tool with real-time close-up photos of traffic collisions. It is found that available APIs are useful for implementing SNS-based transportation applications. It is also found that search times for carpooling partners vary with multiple factors: time-of-day, number of potential partners, and desired tolerance levels for location and time.