Max Beatty

Some mass tran­sit sys­tems choose to oper­ate in a man­ner where you must have Proof-of-Payment at all times while onboard. Gen­er­ally, this is in the form of a paper ticket. These paper tick­ets can be pur­chased from loca­tion aware vend­ing machines at each sta­tion. These machines allow patrons to pay with credit cards, autho­riz­ing trans­ac­tions through a num­ber of highly com­pli­cated finan­cial net­works, for which a paper receipt is printed to show Proof-of-Payment.

Mobile Bank­ing

In this same mag­i­cal world where some­one can go from the street to a seat in a mat­ter of sec­onds thanks to a mag­ne­tized piece of plas­tic, there also exist wire­lessly net­worked hand­held com­put­ers that fit in your pocket. They, too, have the abil­ity to com­mu­ni­cate with the highly com­pli­cated finan­cial net­works and can almost instantly show recent pur­chases to cus­tomers. Most times, they show more detailed and leg­i­ble infor­ma­tion than the pieces of paper printed by the vend­ing machines.

Math Proofs

The paper receipt and mobile bank­ing receipt can not be proven to be equal with­out some other valid piece of infor­ma­tion to tie them together. Trust­ing the valid­ity of the finan­cial net­works and authen­tic­ity of the mobile bank­ing receipt, you can prove you bought n+1 tick­ets with­out n tick­ets or a paper receipt.

For exam­ple, I buy two tick­ets with a credit card from the vend­ing machine and receive three pieces of paper: two tick­ets and a paper receipt. One ticket and the receipt are lost. A mobile bank­ing receipt is pro­duced for the amount of two tick­ets. If that receipt and the ticket that was not lost are pre­sented, it should be accepted as Proof-of-Payment.

On Cal­train, this is not the case. Keep your 19th cen­tury paper scraps and avoid $250 cita­tions (or make the guy from out of town take the fall).

Early today, I came across a blog post describ­ing how to tell if some­one is fol­low­ing you on Twit­ter. It was lim­ited to just the Twitter.com inter­face so I thought I’d expand on their native apps for Mac and iOS.

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I’m mov­ing this week in large part because of Con­ser­vice, a third party billing ser­vice used by lazy land­lords. Land­lords aside, Con­ser­vice is a very shady com­pany. A tweet of mine attracted a response from another unhappy cus­tomer who pro­vided the fol­low­ing details on just how slimey they are.

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The “Who to Fol­low” fea­ture of Twit­ter has been slowly evolv­ing over the past 10 months. Tonight, a strange social graph anom­aly occurred in my time­line. Two friends from dif­fer­ent pasts tweeted the exact same sen­ti­ment almost verbatim.

Bob King and I grew up on the north side of Indi­anapo­lis, and after unknow­ingly cross­ing paths con­tin­u­ally since prob­a­bly birth, became friends in high school. I met Ndeto, who is from north­ern Indi­ana, when I trans­ferred to a dif­fer­ent high school my junior year. Both still live in Indi­ana, have pub­lic Twit­ter accounts, actively tweet about the wide world of sports, and are con­nected through me, but the odds of Twit­ter mak­ing that con­nec­tion are slim and none.

It would be really mean­ing­ful if Twit­ter (or Face­book) could con­nect the social dots in front of peo­ple. This is how you know this per­son. Here is proof you have things in com­mon. Did you see how close you came to jinx­ing this stranger?

@MrN­deto do you know @BKing1024? I went to high school with him in Indy. Look at his and your last tweet.

June 12, 2011 7:59 PM via Twit­ter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@maxbeatty

Max Beatty

@BKing1024 do you know @MrN­deto? I went to high school with him in Muncie. Look at his and your last tweet.

June 12, 2011 7:58 PM via Twit­ter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@maxbeatty

Max Beatty

For now, it’s going to take a per­son inter­ject­ing. In the future, I hope it leads to even deeper con­nec­tions to strangers and even businesses.

I can’t find the quote, but it goes some­thing along the lines of, “Entre­pre­neurs try to fix what they see wrong with the world.” I love Indi­ana Uni­ver­sity. I’ve loved their bas­ket­ball pro­gram since I was a kid, had a suc­cess­ful and enjoy­able tenure as a stu­dent, but have been turned off by most, if not all, of their com­mu­ni­ca­tions I’ve received since grad­u­at­ing. I don’t like any­thing that’s mailed to me and not from my fam­ily, Ama­zon, or Zap­pos, so I’ll focus on emails.

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