May 9, 2006
Introducing LastCall
We're a pretty wired bunch here at DCist, and we imagine that you are, too. Do you get appointments in iCal from Upcoming.org via RSS and use Google Maps to plot your path there? Of course you do.
But what about those odd occasions when you're not by a computer? It's a living hell, we know. Well, we're here to help. Toward that end, we're happy to present LastCall Beta, our effort to make the city's digital offerings accessible from anywhere via the magic of text messaging. We know, Google has totally ruined the term "beta" after letting GMail linger in nomenclature-limbo for months. But when we say it, we mean it — we really do need your help in honing this service.
We picked the name because we want this app to be the last source of information you need to consult during your night on the town. We've got a lot of services to offer: Metro schedules, OpenTable reservations, concert listings, movie showtimes and — of course — the de rigeur SMS weather report. And it's all free! Details on how to use the service (and all the necessary disclaimers) are behind the cut.
The system listens for incoming text messages at the mobile number 202-299-7949. Send all messages there, and expect replies from the same. Reply messages will be split into multiple text messages if their length necessitates it (for OpenTable, movie and music queries, it usually does).
Metro Times
This is why we first started building the system. Ah, the bitter pain of waiting 15 minutes for a train after a night of indulgence. Now you can decide whether it's time to sprint to the escalator or to have one more round. Sure, there are other services that offer similar functionality — but we like our query syntax better.
To get the scheduled times of the next trains at a particular Metro station, send a message that begins with the word 'metro' and is followed by the station name you have in mind. For example:
metro gallery place
Will return the next train times in each direction from that station. The system was designed with drunk fingers in mind — it'll do its best to guess at the station name when an exact match can't be found, so feel free to experiment with abbreviations.
You may also optionally specify a time, which will be interpreted as the nearest matching time in the future. Be sure to specify the minutes, even if the time falls evenly on the hour. For example:
metro courthouse 10:00p
Will retrieve times beginning at 10:00PM. You may omit the colon if it's inconvenient to access on your phone.
OpenTable
But that's not all! OpenTable.com has generously granted us permission to connect to their service. If you're in a neighborhood and want to know what restaurant might be able to accommodate your party, you can send a message specifying the neighborhood name, party size and time, prefixed with ot. The same time-formatting rules apply here as do to the Metro functionality (i.e. be sure to specify the minutes). Here's an example of how to query restaurants in Dupont Circle to see who can seat a party of 3 at 7:00 p.m.:
ot dupont 3 700p
You can query any of the DC-area neighborhoods that OpenTable supports. These are: Adams Morgan, Capitol Hill, Cleveland Park, Downtown, Dupont Circle, Foggy Bottom, Georgetown, Logan Circle, Penn Quarter, Tenleytown, U Street, West End, Woodly Park, Bethesda, Chevy Chase, Olney, Rockville, Silver Spring, Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Keswick, Leesburg, Mclean, Reston, Rosslyn and Tysons Corner. As before, the system will do its best to understand abbreviations.
Concert Listings
OpenTable aren't the only folks who have opened their system to us. Here's A Hint of the eponymous heresahint.org has generously given us permission to redistribute the RSS feeds he maintains of area concert listings. To get a quick summary of who's playing tonight, SMS music to the service.
Movie Times
If you find yourself in the neighborhood of a D.C.-area theater and want to check what's playing and when, you can use the service to do so. Just send a message with the theater name, prefixed with 'movie'. For example:
movie ballston
The service will return all of the remaining showtimes occurring at that theater on the current day. Supported theaters are: Landmark E St, Loews Dupont, Regal Gallery Place, Loews Georgetown, Union Station, Uptown, Courthouse, Potomac Yard, Arlington Drafthouse, Loews Wisconsin Ave, Loews Shirlington and Regal Ballston. As before, reasonable abbreviations will be understood. If there are theaters you'd like support for that aren't listed here, please let us know.
Weather
It wouldn't be an SMS service without a weather forecast, would it? Text weather to get the current conditions and forecast for the rest of the day and tomorrow.
Remembering This Without Keeping a Printout In Your Wallet
We know: it sounds kind of cool, but it's a lot to remember. Well, don't worry. If you can't recall how to talk to the system, you can just text the word help to it. That'll tell you how to get help for each of the individual sub-services. From there it should be easy.
Disclaimers & Performance Considerations
A few caveats. This service is offered without any sort of warranty; we can't guarantee its accuracy or availability (although if you find an error, we'd appreciate being told). And it's only for personal noncommercial use — it's only meant to make your personal life more convenient.
Please note that you may experience some performance hiccups — our cellular provider is occasionally a bit flaky about delivery. If you don't get a response within a couple of minutes, try resending your query.
We've invested more elbow grease than money into this project, and as a result our throughput is limited — I fully expect the server to be reduced to a smoking crater by this announcement post. Things should hopefully level out once the service is out in the wild. If not, we'll look at finding a more robust setup.
Finally
It's taken a lot of work to get this service off the ground, much of which wouldn't have been possible or practical without the support of friends, colleagues and the DCist staff. I'm particularly grateful to the folks at EchoDitto for the ideas and technical insights they offered.
That's it! We'd love to hear about your experiences, ideas and problems with the service, either in comments or by email. I can be reached at tom @ this domain.
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This is way cool... it didn't recognize Vasq as an abbreviation for Virginia Square Metro though ;-)
Sorry about that, dipdewdog. Try putting a space between "va" and "sq" -- that oughtta work. I'll look into whether the space requirement can be lifted without interfering with the other metro names (I think it should be okay).
I love this so far, but can you search OpenTable with all Metro Station names? Or just a select few? I tried McPherson Square randomly and got a 'no entries found' reply.
Alex I don't believe it supports metro stops for OpenTable, unless those stops happen to correspond with the neighborhoods listed.
Anon is correct. We're limited by the neighborhoods that OpenTable uses in its internal processes, as listed on this page. The Metro and OpenTable portions of the app are separate from each other.
Really nice work, Tom!
Outstanding! One problem, Metro app (w/o time) seems to return 'no train' for several stops.
lastcall looks patently awesome. there's just one thing missing from your writeup: a privacy policy. how can users of the service expect their phone numbers and query history to be treated?
This is great...thanks a lot. One Problem: I just texted "Metro farragut north" and got the reply "Shady Grove: no trains Glenmont: no trains SMS 'taxi' for numbers."
Cool! What's it built on?
raw: if you can tell me exactly what you typed, it'd be helpful. I'm seeing some logged entries for things like "Mcphereson", which is simply incorrect. I'll try to make the matching system a little friendlier based on the feedback I receive here, but you shouldn't expect it to be able to handle all permutations -- particular incorrect (rather than merely shortened) ones. If you correctly enter the full name for the station it really ought to work based upon my testing.
Also worth noting from the logs: the service doesn't supply weather reports for Miami (or any other non-Washington city) or speak English ("What is the number for jaleo in bethesda?" was queried -- we may add a restaurant phone number feature later, but it still won't be able to respond to sentences like that).
24 HR time please, if am/pm is omitted?
A quick update. I actually spelled farragut with only 1 r in my original text message. That could be the problem. I tried texting with the correct spelling and have yet to receive a response. Thanks again.
Tim: that shouldn't be happening. I think some bad data got cached in the database -- I cleared things out and it's working now. I'll investigate further as soon as I can. Please let me know if it happens again.
Grda: users can expect not to have their phone numbers used for marketing purposes, either via SMS or voice calls. Query data should be anonymous, but we don't intend to use it for anything besides internal reporting. I would also like to reserve the right to call or text someone personally if I need their help debugging an error related to a query they made. This isn't likely to happen very often.
L: It's built with Linux, Gammu, MySQL, Python and Perl. I'll have a more detailed writeup of the system on my personal blog sometime in the near future.
Thanks for mentioning traincheck...and hey, we
(edited by the DCist powers-that-be to fix the HTML)
L: sorry, we won't be supporting 24-hr style. Right now if you don't specify am/pm it assumes you mean the next matching time from the current hour (this applies to both opentable and metro). That setup can't coexist with a 24hr one. My intuition is that more people would be comfortable with the system we have than with 24-hr times, which are generally only comfortable-seeming to Europeans, the military and geeks like myself.
DCist Tom, problem solved. Thanks!
...we love our syntax. :)
Good work Tom!
I've had success with music and metro so far...can you do specific dates or venues with the music?
Thanks for a cool system!
Absolutely fantastic! To add to the list of movie theatres, it would be great if you could include the AMC at Tysons Corner.
Absolutely fantastic! To add to the list of movie theatres, it would be great if you could include the AMC at Tysons Corner.
Absolutely fantastic! To add to the list of movie theatres, it would be great if you could include the AMC at Tysons Corner.
Tom,
This is awesome.
Would be helpful if you could specify the station and the destination. At stations along the orange/blue lines there is heavy traffic, so you only really see the next train arriving...not the next three.
Hmm. Not to be skeptical (or cynical) but...
Does the Metro really have a computer system so advanced that train schedules can accurately be sent to an outside source? How does this work, the geek wants to know?
The system works by interfacing with the RideGuide website. RideGuide only relays scheduled times -- it doesn't have access to the Metro COTS system (yet... Dan Tangherlini has indicated WMATA is considering making that data publicly available).
So this means that, yes, the information may not be perfectly accurate, particularly when trains get delayed. But it will tend to only be inaccurate during peak times, when you don't have to wait that long for a train anyway. On the weekends and late at night trains run less frequently and stay on schedule more. Since that's when the service is most useful, everything should hopefully work out.
Based on my experiences while testing the service, the times are pretty accurate -- although it's a good idea to get to the platform at least a minute before the train is supposed to be there.
this new feature is awesome -- many thanks!
What about metro bus?
I'd love to support Metrobus, Amy, but it's a tall order. While it's possible to get the schedule from RideGuide, figuring out which stop on which line a person means would be very difficult (and RideGuide isn't really very well suited to querying by bus line). I suspect WMATA will be making more data publicly available in the near future, though, and when they do we'll be sure to see how we can capitalize on that info.
Wow! Holy smokes. This is a real nice feature. Thanks!
it's a great service, but please post a cheat sheet that we can send to our own phones or pda's. Simplicity will probably add more users:
e.g.
Movies
text [city] [time]
Tx
Have a closer look: that functionality is already built in. Text "help" to have the system walk you through how to use it.
Just a note - most Cell carriers charge a dime a message for both incoming and outgoing messages unless you have a data or text plan. You might want to put that under the disclaimers section.
A dime per? I think you may need a better cell provider, anon. Most of the plans I'm familiar with allow for a given number of SMSes per month, then charge on a per-message basis. But you're right -- your carrier's charges will apply, and the service may send more than one message in reply to your query.
I tried "metro ballston" and got back "no trains". But it did appear that it recognized the metro stops showing both directions as no trains.
I just tried to confirm, anon, and got back the proper train times. If you get that result, I'd suggest resending your query. I will be trying to track the bug down, but it appears that the rideguide website occasionally experiences hiccups that result in this incorrect result.
Bus schedules could be incorporated by using neighborhood names in lieu of particular bus stops. Select one bus stop as a 'time point' in each neighborhood.
That's a pretty interesting idea. It's not quite as simple as that because of the way rideguide works, but I'll definitely begin mulling it over, kb.
I'm also getting the "no trains" message after texting the system with "metro dupont" ...
I'm also getting the "no trains" message after texting the system with "metro dupont." I tried resending my query twice more, only to get the same result. HOWEVER, this is bad-ass. Nice work, guys...
Thanks, Scott. Looks like WMATA changed up their website on us, breaking the service. I've put in a maintenance notice and a post should be going up on the DCist frontpage shortly. I'll get this fixed ASAP.
Sooo... I just tried sending a text (metro farragut west) and didn't get a response after 8 minutes. Are there times of day when you're less likely to get a speedy response? I used it this AM and got one back within a minute.
Sorry to hear you had trouble with LastCall, Joanne. Responses may take slightly longer when the system is under heavy load, but 8 minutes is way too long. In general, if you don't get a reply within a minute, I'd suggest resending your query.
I know that's inconvenient (and may cost you an extra couple cents). But it's the nature of the beast: SMS is a surprisingly unreliable medium, if you look at the delivery stats. The fact that this system is built with budget-stretching in mind doesn't help, either.
If you'd like to get to the bottom of this, you can email me your phone number, the query you sent and the approximate time of day that you sent it. I can at least check to see whether your message made it to our server. Email's tom@ this domain.
yo Tom, the query for "movie loews gtown" is busted... I think AMC bought Loews..or at least the name has changed for that theatre to AMC.. i wonder if that's causing the rupture.. :)
thanks!
I just tested the system - first time I've tried to use it, and to my "metro dupont" query got a response that there are no trains to shady grove or glenmont. Huh?
I tested out the movie times for Ballston. I got an immediate response, but all the movie times were wrong!
I just texted "movie gallery place" and recieved back "Regal Gallery Pl Happy Feet 10", but according to the imdb website of movie times, Happy Feet plays at 11pm tonight, and there are 12 other movies with showtimes after 9:50pm.
good luck working out the kinks, this is an awesome service!
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Seems like it doesn't work if the first letter is capitalized. Make sure to use lower case.
I tinkered with it today (just came across this site) and it appears that nothing works anymore. Did you guys officially retire this or something and forget to tell folks? All I know is like a few others, especially those who posted more recently, I was getting 'no listings' for common things (movies in Dupont, metro stations, open table listings in Adams morgan). What gives?