Friday, October 23, 2009

Tweeting During a Race

I toyed with the idea of Tweeting about the Columbus Marathon Half during the race last Sunday. Because I have a typical cell phone (no keyboard), and I am really slow at texting, I thought it might not be a good thing to do.

I was pleasantly surprised to learn about a new online service called TweetMyTime! Through this service, people who follow me on Twitter were able to see how I did during the race. TweetMyTime automatically sent a message when I hit the starting line, when I got to the 10K point and when I finished. The full marathoners had a total of five updates sent about them. The information included my pace and expected finish time and they came directly from me.

There are other services that send update messages during a race. I think when I was in the Cooper River Bridge Run, text messages could be sent via phone to other cell phones. I think I remember that other services allow friends and family to track participants on computers, too.

But there is something about a service making use of Twitter that appealed to me. The number of notes of congratulations I received from followers was great!

So I liked the service and I would definitely use it for free again. If it ends up being a pay to use service, not sure if I would do it. In the meantime, check it out!

http://tweetmytime.com/

4 comments:

Nyle said...

wow, what a cool function of tweet. It is an application that I have just not really cottoned on to...lol...but to be able to send out tweets of pace and time at set points is awesome.

Nate Riggs said...

Thanks so much for the props on TweetMyTime! The team and I at huber+co were really happy with the outcome. We have a few bugs that are being worked out, but hopefully you'll see this being used in some other races soon. Again, thanks for the props! :)

Cindi said...

Nyle,

I hope you have the chance to use it sometime. It was nice! I do so many races, my family no longer goes to watch, so I don't need any of the services that are strictly to help people find you on the course. Though, now that I think about it, it might help us locate each other when we travel as a group.

The best part was I really enjoyed getting the congratulation tweets from my followers!

Cindi said...

Nate,

I have no problem writing about products I like. (At the same time, I have no problem writing about products I don't like, too.)

Good luck! I hope you and your partners are successful!