Tag: TRAFFIC

Well, it's happened, Facebook has gone and destroyed all that is holy about the Internet. A study released this week by Experian Hitwise found that for the first time, traffic to social networking sites has edged out that to "entertainment" (bam chicka wah wah) sites. Before you pour one on the curb, it's worth noting the study only looked at U.K. users. And we all know that they have some issues ...

On Friday, Michael Micheletti was driving along a Seattle interstate, when his BMW suddenly stalled and came to a stop in the middle lane. The incident led to a lengthy traffic jam and left Micheletti feeling pretty embarrassed. So, he decided to apologize for the inconvenience, via Twitter. "That black BMW stalled in the center lane of I-5? Yeah, that's me. Sorry, I don't like it either," ...

Yesterday, Denver police found themselves in the middle of a lengthy standoff with a robot that had threatened to blow up Coors Field. Fortunately for all of humanity, the white, eight-inch 'bot was just a toy. Unfortunately for the 'bot, though, police had no choice but to put it out of its misery. A citizen first noticed the robot yesterday afternoon, and immediately notified local police. ...

Finland is testing out a new traffic cam that not only spies you when you speed, but uses image-analysis software to read your license plate, check your insurance and tax status, and even determine whether or not you're wearing your seatbelt. Not creeped out yet? The ASSET speed cameras can also dole out tickets for tailgating, by measuring the distance between you and the car in front of you. ...

Well, it looks like MySpace's makeover hasn't done a lot to slow its inevitable slide into online obscurity. According to the Wall Street Journal, Twitter has now surpassed the once-popular social network in unique visitors, cementing its position as the third most popular social network in the world. According to data from comScore Inc., the site received almost 96 million unique hits last month, ...

Traffic lights habitually serve as the bane of commuters. Getting stopped at a red with no sign of approaching traffic, missing a synchronized green because of unforeseen obstacles and falling short of a fleeting turn arrow all contribute to those ever-expanding back and neck stress knots. Two European researchers, Stefan Lämmer and Dirk Helbing, believe they may have a solution to those ...

China thinks it may have a solution to its growing car and congestion problem: giant buses that straddle the road. Although calling these monstrosities "buses" seem misguided (as they run on tracks, and independently of other street traffic), it's obvious that they could greatly increase the speed and quality of your average Beijing commute. The shuttles arch over the road, allowing other ...

As India's middle class has swollen in recent years, so too has its share of untrained drivers. As a result, the country now endures more traffic-related fatalities than any other nation, and weaving through any of its major cities has become a feat of Herculean proportion. Police in Delhi, though, recently stumbled upon an entirely new approach to controlling the city's roadway pandemonium: ...

Reddit needs help. And it's asking its readers to provide it. In a recent, doleful blog post, programmer Mike Schiraldi implored the Reddit community to donate resources to the site in an effort to ease the workload of the four engineers who work around the clock "just to keep things going." Even as its traffic has ballooned to about 280 million page views per month, the site continues to function ...

Real-time traffic updates delivered to your GPS or cell phone are not particularly new. But, as Scientific American points out, there is a major limitation to these systems. Namely, most drivers are already on the road, and often already stuck in traffic, when they receive these alerts. This is because they're little more than live traffic reports and cannot predict what traffic may look like in ...

Google has released an exhaustive list of the 1,000 most visited sites on the Web. Facebook, Yahoo!, Live, Wikipedia and MSN made up the top five, pulling in over 1.99 trillion unique visitors every month. With the list, Google is giving advertisers the option to cherrypick where they want their ads in order to improve placement for their products or services. What's fascinating, though, is the ...

With hopes of preventing traffic accidents, IBM's latest patent could actually take control of your engine. As scary as that sounds, according to Engadget, the patent application is for a stoplight system that tells a car when to stop and go by sending remote signals to its engine. When you roll up to a red light, IBM would send a "stop-engine notification" to your vehicle. We're assuming there ...

Even though many of us are still baffled as to why teens feel the need to text while driving, and even though innumerable news stories warn of the potentially fatal consequences, the younguns just keep on doing it. Old-school, gory, scared-straight films like 'Red Asphalt' and the like -- screened in darkened drivers-ed classrooms across the U.S. -- may not be addressing the problem. So what's ...

We sort of had an idea that Twitter was blowing up in a big way. As it turns out, though, we really had no idea. According to the Twitter analytics team, tweeting activity has grown exponentially over the past three years, to the point where people are now posting about 50 million tweets per day, or roughly 600 tweets per second. As you can see in the above summary graph, the majority of the ...

It was only a matter of time, really. After ceding its traffic throne to Google two years ago, Yahoo! has recently been knocked down yet another notch. As Mashable reports, Facebook has shot past the search engine to claim the title of second-most visited site in the US. According to new data released from Compete.com, 133.62 million people visited Facebook in January, compared to the 132 million ...