I was inspired by this story in the Anchorage Daily News about a woman that started @AKBadDrivers “who started describing bad drivers on her personal Twitter feed from her spot in the passenger seat as she commuted in from Wasilla.” The simple brilliance of this usage of Twitter really struck me. With tweets like

• silver jeep, FLB 272. thanks for cutting me off not once but TWICE when you were going straight in turn only lanes prick.
• To the girl in the Green Explorer outside Muldoon Fred Meyers this afternoon: Sorry my U-turn scared you. My bad :-(
• white Nissan pu FEL 365 hang up ur cell phone pay attention 2 ur driving. ur lane ended & you nearly hit me merging 2 mine.

… I wanted a piece of that action! So I started @NJBadDrivers and @CTBadDrivers. Then I realized I better grab @NYBadDrivers to complete the tri-state trifecta. Imitation is the sincerest form, right ? After talking to my buddy who moved up to Alaska, he said that people really are crazy drivers up there, but come on, can they really be worse than New York, Connecticut or New Jersey drivers? (Admittedly, I’ve had licenses in all 3 states.) I’m running with Christopher Finke’s slick little python application called retweet on my Dreamhost account. If Chrstopher’s name sounds familiar (it should!) it’s cuz he’s the mastermind behind ScribeFire and the TwitterBar Firefox add-on. For those interested in running retweet on Dreamhost, be sure to use python2.5 as it already has the sqlite3 library configured. Once I figured that out, I cron’d it and it’s been working like a charm. So how’s it work? All you need to do is send a message to one of the accounts via Twitter and it will get retweeted by the bot. Just say “@NJBadDrivers does anyone around here know how to function at a four way stop???” or “@NYBadDrivers srsly people, traffic circles are not that difficult”. I wonder… is reserving Twitter names the new domain squatting? If so, would it be called twatting?