Smart Transportation

iCarpool has tentatively scheduled a minor update for the weekend of July 30th.

iCarpool has tentatively scheduled a minor update for the weekend of July 30th. These are the highlights of the changes:
- Remove the Travel Buddy functionality.

Background: Travel Buddy functionality was in the early stages of development. Functionality was intended to be used similar to "friends" in Facebook to track what your buddies were doing in RSO. Users have confused Travel Buddy functionality with Ridematching and tried to use it to form ridematches (which did not work). In the interest of reducing confusion, Travel Buddy has been removed until such time that it is fully functional and confusion with Ridematching can be addressed.

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Permalink Reply by Suzanne Seigneur on July 28, 2011 at 9:27am

It would be really helpful to have more notice of functionality that is removed - thank goodness I saw this just now and was able to stop my printer before I had 300 copies of our Idaho RideShare Guide printed up! Seriously though, there should be a systematic approach to phasing out features so we don't continue to train people or proliferate material on features that don't exist. Emailing would be more appropriate as it gets to everyone's inbox...email notification of new versions of the manual would also be really, really helpful.

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Permalink Reply by Amol B on July 29, 2011 at 3:11pm

Removing a feature is not a typical update we make - so I thought I would share some background about this specific feature and its removal and what we are doing as regards the updates process. As early as November last year we've started seeing requests from RSO administrators to remove or revamp the Travel Buddy feature - since then there has been an ongoing dialogue about removal or hiding this feature.

The Travel Buddy feature has not been one of the more used features in the platform. In May, once the Facebook integration was launched - the integration allowed users to post their planned trips to their Facebook wall so that others in their network (buddies) could see and possibly rideshare for that trip. With the number of daily users using the Facebook-iCarpool integration reaching over 500 already, the Facebook integration has been a success. There are certain advantages with Facebook integration - users don't have to reform their network in this system again - and we get to leverage a larger social network of the user. We plan to monitor Facebook usage and if the trends hold - then that will reconfirm the plan of relying on Facebook integration for the buddy scenarios.

I also wanted to discuss about the update notifications. In the same way popular platforms in the market which have continously evolving software operate, most update notifications especially involving minor updates are available post the update. In the coming months, we are trying out a model that will include a notification of the highlights in the update prior to the update (typically a Thursday notification for a weekend update). For major updates such as the upcoming home page change and changes in the vanpool administration - the communication typically happens in advance.