With out a doubt my post about Google Maps + Gas price data + RSS is the most popular entry I have right now. It’s apparent that people want this service – yet it’s not available. The big limit here isn’t the presentation technology, its the lack of data itself. This post is about some thoughts I’ve had lately on how we can improve the data that drives these services. I have two sets of ideas – ways to improve the existing model, and a service I think gas companies should be offering.
As it stands right now, all gas price websites are “fuelled” buy user submitted data. The problems with this are
• The pumps your interested in are not listed.
• The data usually it isn’t accurate and it’s usually old.
• There’s no real way of validating this data – technically speaking anyone could enter any price.
So to improve this existing model we need more incentive, but also we need better methods of collecting data from the field. As I mentioned before, sharing the revenue of the website that offers these services is a way to get more participation. However - Is it enough to get people to scour the city and monitor gas price signs? What about collecting data from the field? If a business did get this model setup, they could setup a SMS service where people could text in the price of a pump /w pre designated pump ID codes.
So can a business be made around these ideas? Could someone setup a Fuel Price service that collects user data and somehow reward them for their accurate and prompt updates? This data could then be resold via xml web services to Mashup sites, or even be a Mashup itself. However I don’t have any solid ideas on how this site could bring in enough revenue to make this all – you would need a big pile of money to fuel the incentive to pull all of the pump data with constant updates.
This lead me to my second idea.. Why do we have to enter this data? Why doesn’t every single pump sign have a URL to a RSS feed (or a page /w RSS feed). Isn’t this a service that the fuel companies should be offering us?
I mean sure it’s a big technical implementation but I’m sure these gas stations have some kind of communication pipeline to set the pricing anyway. If head office knows the current price of every single station, it should offer that up to the world. This could be that “fancy feature” that makes a small chain into a large one. I’ll just put this idea on the table for now — I’m sure you can thing of good reasons why this will never happen, but think about how cool it would be if all of this data was available. I’d love to see real-time trending data of prices going up and down for all of North America when big events happen.
Are you thinking about building a Mashup like this? I’ve given out most of my ideas in this post but if you wanted to do a 1on1 chat I’m sure we could brainstorm some new ideas for your business. I offer consulting services so give me a call!
