Social Media Strategy Crucial for Transit Agencies After Storm

“I have asked nicely several times about what’s going on with the 317 bus,” the rider, who identified herself as Mary Scandell, fumed on the Facebook page of New Jersey Transit a few days after Hurricane Sandy. “Now I’m gonna ask in a nasty way.”

Change the scene to New York. A commuter named Jim Temple posted a question on the Long Island Rail Road’s Facebook page, asking for a status update of the damaged Long Beach line. The railroad promptly replied. “Thank you for the info,” Mr. Temple answered.

If there is one lesson transit officials have learned from Hurricane Sandy, it is that in the Internet era, keeping riders up to date is just as important as tracks and rolling stock. Blow it, and they will let you know. As workers raced to bring washed-out tracks, flooded tunnels and swamped electrical equipment back online, they also faced the daunting task of keeping millions of riders informed of conditions and schedules that sometimes shifted by the minute, using tools that included Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube.

A look at how New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road communicated, as viewed through the prism of Facebook, showed how approaches to messaging could make the difference between shaping expectations or fueling the ire of customers forced to find new ways to get to work and home.

The Long Island Rail Road continually updated its Facebook page with photographs and videos of storm preparations before Hurricane Sandy hit. The dispatches continued as high winds and surge waters ripped down power lines and clogged rail lines with wayward boats and other debris. The agency frequently answered passengers’ questions and posted other helpful updates, like where to seek federal assistance for damaged homes.

New Jersey Transit also regularly updated its page — but did not start posting photographs until after noon on Oct. 30, after the storm had barreled through. It answered riders’ questions sporadically, sometimes referring them to incorrect information on its Web site, even as commuters grew more confused trying to figure out shifting schedules.

The result: the Long Island Rail Road conveyed a narrative of shared pain, of workers fighting back against unprecedented damage that was beyond their control. Passengers frequently and vociferously critical of the railroad suddenly sympathized and even praised communication efforts that, if not perfect, were viewed as improved.

New Jersey Transit’s communications, on the other hand, became for many commuters yet another source of misery.

“Long Island Rail Road learned the lesson of telling their riders what’s going on,” said Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. “And it turns out that is as important as the level of service you are providing.”

The Long Island Rail Road and New Jersey Transit also used Twitter extensively. But The New York Times examined the Facebook pages of each agency because they allow for more detailed comments — providing a deeper look at how passengers were viewing communications — and more of a back-and-forth discussion. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which was also criticized for its communications, used Twitter but does not have a Facebook page.

New Jersey Transit has come under scrutiny after the storm damaged more than 300 train cars and locomotives parked in rail yards in Hoboken and the Meadowlands that prestorm warnings indicated would flood.

But even before that decision became widely known, passenger tensions were spiking.

New Jersey Transit officials defended their communications throughout and after the storm.

“We were tweeting information practically 24 hours a day,” said John Durso Jr., the agency’s spokesman. He said the agency also continually updated its Web site; sent out e-mail alerts; placed advertisements in newspapers on emergency shuttle, bus and ferry service; and made frequent appearances on television and radio broadcasts.

Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 Could Be Naruto's Best Brawler

The annual, unchanging Naruto Shippuden: Ultimate Ninja Storm series has little to offer anyone but hardcore fans. For that particular audience, though, it’s a consistent, reliable giver. It rarely shakes up the core mechanics of its 3D combat, instead opting to improve the spectacle of it all.

Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 appeals to fans that may have been let down last time, and gives them new layers to appreciate. And all the while, it leaves those unfamiliar with the popular anime in awe.

It’s clear developer CyberConnect2 learned a lot working on Asura’s Wrath – Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 has more interactive button-prompt sequences than ever. Typically quick time events leave bad tastes in gamers’ mouths, but these are so stylish in presentation that they’re easy to love. Fights are as much about fast-paced punching as they are presentation, so if you’re not into watching a bit of action go down and having control taken away, you’re absolutely not going to fall for Naruto Shippuden. That said, battles are fully watchable separate from the game because they’re so true to Naruto’s television style.

This is particularly true during the returning boss battles. What’s not to love about beating a city-smashing fox with a giant pipe, or transforming into a massive fighter and suplexing it in a Godzilla fight? Yes, that’s really a thing. Check it out:

Their spectacular scale is part of a broader thesis in Ultimate Ninja Storm 3: Size matters. It’s all about huge bosses, more fighters, and more ways to play. The most intriguing new addition for Naruto fans, though, is the minor element of choices – again, another in-the-moment interruption for those concerned about it. During some battles, the camera will zoom in behind your brawler at an important moment, giving you the opportunity to finish the fight or play through a flashback. The memories serve more than a story purpose – giving you insight into the characters – because they fundamentally change the form and function of your fight.

If you're playing as Naruto, for instance, you'll flip back in time from the Shippuden era -- just before the Fourth Shinobi World War in which Ultimate Ninja Storm 3 is set -- to the ninja's childhood. The characters you and your opponent play revert to their younger selves, changing their appearance as well as play style, special moves, and interaction. This disrupts expectations you have going into a fight, and forces you to learn to play multiple fighters. It's a clever bit of fan service that also adds an interesting element to an encounter.

Naruto Shippuden games have been predictable until now. With more than 70 characters in the roster, the return of epic boss battles, and the switcheroo flashback matches, there's enough here to keep even the most vetted fans on their toes -- and that's exactly what this series needed to stay strong.

ShootMania Storm Blows eSport Wide Open

It’s fitting that the impenetrable clique of competitive gaming should be breached by a first-person shooter, a genre that has long formed one of the key pillars of eSport. All too often, new titles added to this elite pantheon grant dominion to those with a prescient understanding of the established order. Rarely has a game deemed complex enough to promote the required high-level play and sufficiently balanced to prove entertaining to watch been so welcoming to a host of potential new champions.

Thanks to ShootMania Storm’s customisation options you can become very good at it on your own terms, without the hard slog associated with having to play as cannon fodder for several hours. If you don’t like the game’s default maps or modes you can turn to the community’s offerings or simply create your own. So, while the rigors of Call of Duty’s multiplayer demand that you pay for your stripes with the blood of countless deaths, ShootMania offers a gentler, more considered and altogether more fun way of becoming a skilful player.

“When we started building Shootmania we had an eye on what we’d done with Trackmania Nations, which was also intended to be an eSport title from the ground up,” explains Edouard Beauchemin, Nadeo’s international product manager.

“

When we started building Shootmania we had an eye on what we’d done with Trackmania Nations, which was also intended to be an eSport title from the ground up.

“So, when we devised Shootmania Storm we also wanted that to be part of the mix and the very first thing that we worked really hard to achieve was to make sure that it’s appealing to watch. It has to be a great show: the game modes, the timing of the rounds, the spectator tools and providing many different stats in-game to allow shoutcasters to do their job.”

Of course, the fact that Shootmania is a FPS makes it instantly more decipherable than other common eSport genres, such as fighters and MOBAs. The majority of game players are familiar with the concepts, mechanics and language that form the basis of the most popular genre in video games. However, the biggest contributing factor that will allow new teams of eSport contenders to rise through the ranks of ShootMania is that it provides a gradual learning curve facilitated by an intelligent selection of game modes, which are, crucially, fun to play.

Shootmania Storm has already been signed up by IPL (IGN Pro League) thanks, in part, to its Elite mode. This part of the game is stable, balanced and eminently playable despite ShootMania as a whole being in the first of three planned beta phases.

Elite mode also attracted a lot of attention at Ubisoft’s recent digital day in Paris, drawing players and onlookers alike with its fast-pace and easy to fathom rule set. Beauchemin attributes this to the mode’s concentrated distillation of a key element of spectator sports: excitement.

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The best moments in FPS eSports are when you’re near the end of a round and maybe there’s just one guy standing and everyone knows he’s going to have to pull off an amazing feat to win.

“The best moments in FPS eSports are when you’re near the end of a round and maybe there’s just one guy standing and everyone knows he’s going to have to pull off an amazing feat to win,” Beauchemin enthuses. “We’ve boiled that down to one single game mode where it comes down to the last minute of the round: there’s one guy with a powerful gun and three armour points versus three guys with one armour point each who are working as a team.

“It’s really exciting to play and to watch because you can focus on just one person and see his choices and super-moves, whereas with 5 Vs 5, for example, it can get really messy and hard for spectators to keep track of everything that’s going on.”

Elite still supports six players in total, as each player on both teams takes turns to be the “hero” and tries to annihilate the opposing team or score a point by capturing the single base. This offers two distinct ways of winning and means intelligent traversal of the environment can see the round won without a single shot being fired, though this is the exception rather than the norm.

Nadeo intends that ShootMania’s status as an eSport not be restricted to major international events. Unsurprisingly, ShootMania’s highly customisable nature is called upon again as players are given the tools to create and host their own tournaments, which they can then publicise through use of in-game currency.

“

With 5 Vs 5 it can get really messy and hard for spectators to keep track of everything that’s going on.

ShootMania’s adaptable nature means its official tag as an eSports title needn’t make it the exclusive domain of members of a digital Mount Olympus. Its persistent, intuitive controls and non-convoluted depth means it remains accessible, while offering the opportunity to its players to participate in competitive tournament play, even if they’ve never previously considered themselves eSports calibre.

“Ultimately, our games are powered by players,” Beauchemin concludes. “Some want to run competitions, some design levels and others simply take part by playing, all of which are essential to the community structure of our games.”

To apply for the ShootMania Storm beta program, visit the game’s website.

Stace Harman is a freelance contributor to IGN and is convinced that zombies will one day inherit the Earth. You can follow him on Twitter.

Amazon’s Cloud Is Disrupted by a Summer Storm

The cutting edge of the Web just bled a little.

On Friday night, lightning in Virginia took out part of Amazon’s cloud computing service, called Amazon Web Services, which hundreds of companies use for data storage and computation. Well-known sites like Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram were not accessible for hours. There was little information for customers about what had happened, or even whether user data was safe.

The interruption underlined how businesses and consumers are increasingly exposed to unforeseen risks and wrenching disruptions as they increasingly embrace life in the cloud. It was also a big blow to what is probably the fastest-growing part of the media business, start-ups on the social Web that attract millions of users seemingly overnight.

Besides Internet-connected computers, tablets and smartphones, which people rely on daily, consumers and businesses are connected to the Web through everything from cars and appliances to utility monitors and surveillance cameras. How well the systems behind these are built, and how they handle unforeseen disruptions, will increasingly affect the larger economy.

Amazon has built a thriving business in cloud computing, with a range of customers including Intercontinental Hotels, Fox Entertainment, Unilever, Spotify, as well as 187 government agencies and hundreds of small start-ups looking for the cheapest possible computing.

None of these big customers reported any service disruptions. While it was not clear if they were using the Amazon center that was crippled, analysts said the disruption would cause renewed scrutiny of their dependence on cloud computing.

“The way companies view it is in terms of reliability generally,” said Michael Chui, a senior fellow at McKinsey & Company. Big customers of Amazon, he said, “have the opportunity to shape the marketplace and make demands that make products better. They will push for improvements.”

They will also have another option. On Thursday, Google said it would offer computing over the Internet at half the price of Amazon.

The weekend’s disruption happened after a lightning storm caused the power to fail at the Amazon Web Services center in Northern Virginia containing thousands of computer servers. For reasons Amazon was still unsure of on Sunday, the data center’s backup generator also failed.

By midday Saturday, Amazon said in a statement that it had restored service “to most of our impacted customers, and continue to work to restore service to our remaining impacted customers,” adding, “we will share more details on this event in the coming days.” The company had no further comment.

It was at least the second major failure for Amazon in that area. In April 2011, a problem in Amazon’s networking at a nearby data center took down a number of applications and popular Web sites, including Reddit and Quora, for more than a day.

To be sure, Amazon Web Services held up better than many utilities affected by the storm, which left more than four million homes and businesses without power on the East Coast. By Sunday, some Instagram customers in the Washington area could, through their cellphones, share pictures on the Web before they had lights or safe drinking water.

Netflix, along with Pinterest and Instagram, did not respond to requests for comment Sunday. Netflix was able to restore service in a couple of hours. Many more Amazon customers, including the small start-ups that make up the bulk of its customers, did not report any problems, but may have scrambled to make sure their systems were secure.

“We were late at work, playing an online video game that went down, then got a notification from our own system that it was starting to fail,” said Benjamin Coe, the founder of Attachments.me, a start-up in San Francisco that connects e-mail attachments to online data storage services. “We had built for redundancy, but our system failed in two areas, making it hard for the third to work.”

Mr. Coe said he stayed up until 4 a.m. fixing the problem. It was, he said, the price of working cheaply with a service that enabled his six-person company to potentially serve millions of customers, who he said would be understanding about brief shutdowns.

“For a consumer product that is free, there is an understanding all around that things can fail occasionally,” he said. “If you were flying a plane or something, this would be totally unacceptable.”

The ability to deal with failures has long been a feature of any computing system, but like much else in the cloud, there are no common standards to guide how much protection against disaster is enough. Many start-ups appear not to take advantage of more expensive redundancy features in Amazon, like swapping data between the East Coast and West Coast Amazon facilities.

Bigger companies are moving to the cloud as well, but may now look at Amazon Web Services as a stopgap as much as a primary provider.

“Maybe 15 percent of our customers now keep their data with us in the cloud, but in three years that could be 75 percent,” said Carl Bass, chief executive of Autodesk, a leading maker of design software. Most of that data is stored on Amazon servers for now, he said, but the company is weighing managing its own cloud, as customers use cheap cloud computing to generate huge numbers of design simulations.

“It’ll cost $10 million to get started, and we’ll probably still rely on A.W.S. to handle big workloads,” he said. “We’re going to need tools for infinite computing.”

As Weather Channel Buys Wunderground, Storm Clouds Brew Among Fans

The announcement on Monday that the Weather Channel Companies, owners of television’s Weather Channel and weather.com, would buy one of its rivals, Weather Underground, set off howls of displeasure on social media platforms and around water coolers across the nation. The purchase price was not disclosed.

In the eyes of Weather Underground’s ardent fans, the Weather Channel appears to represent the wrong kind of weather information: personality-driven sunniness and hype, they say, rather than the pure science of data. As Mike Tucker, a computer professional in New Hampshire, put it on Facebook, reacting to news of the deal: “Nooooooooooooooooo! Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

The controversy illustrates the deep national divide between those people who just want to know if it’s going to rain, and people who really, really, care about the data underlying the weather. Christopher Maxwell, a manager at a solar energy company in Richmond, Va., is in the really-really-cares-about-the-weather camp. He said he saw the Weather Channel deal as a sad sellout for Weather Underground.

“It seems to happen all the time,” he said. “Something great gets invented and sold in the United States, and it gets bought up and destroyed.”

Weather Underground was founded in 1995 in Ann Arbor, where it grew out of the University of Michigan’s online weather database. The name was a winking reference to the radical group that also had its roots in Ann Arbor. Mr. Maxwell said he appreciated Weather Underground’s fanatical devotion to data, and how it drew information from so many thousands of weather stations run by users that he is able to determine “microclimates” of variation that can prove important in getting the most out of a new solar installation.

In other words, as he put it on Facebook, “I liked that Wunderground was indy and for weather geeks and not so much ‘normies.’ ”

For Mr. Tucker, the “Nooooooooooooooooo!” response was a reaction to what he sees as the Weather Channel’s penchant for the commercialization of weather. In a telephone interview, he said: “I’m looking at the site right now, and it’s laden with ads, and promotional things for their shows. I don’t really care about all that stuff. I only care what the weather is.”

Mr. Tucker called the Weather Underground site “simple and somewhat elegant” by comparison.

Paul Baginski, a visiting assistant professor of mathematics at Smith College, said that when he assigned his students to run their hometown temperature data through a series of calculus functions, he pointed them toward Weather Underground instead of Weather.com because it was so much easier to track down historical data on the independent site. “It seemed with every update to their Web site, weather.com added another obstacle” with advertisements and extra tabs and clicks, he said.

Weather Underground’s devotion to weather data has brought the site about 10 million unique visitors a month, according to the measurement firm ComScore, and has helped it to remain an independent company for the better part of two decades. A similar site, WeatherBug, draws 21 million visitors a month. (WeatherBug is owned by Earth Networks.)

Both sites, however, are dwarfed by Weather.com and the other properties owned by the Weather Channel, which is owned by a consortium that includes Comcast, Bain Capital and the Blackstone Group. The Weather Channel sites draw almost 50 million visitors a month. But only half of Weather Underground’s users also use Weather.com in a given month, which might be considered a silent protest of sorts.

Every so often one of the bosses of the Weather Channel had tried to buy Weather Underground, company officials said, and every so often the site politely declined. But this time was different.

“In the past three years, we’ve gotten our act together and become a mature company,” Weather Underground’s president, Alan Steremberg, said in a telephone interview. “We’ve had amazing growth.” Now, he said, it was time to get help from a bigger company.

Which very well may be. But why would the Weather Channel want to acquire a site loved by people who hate the Weather Channel?

When a reporter asked this very question on Monday, the newly acquired Mr. Steremberg, on a conference call interview with David Kenny, the chairman and chief executive of the Weather Channel Companies, tried to be a good corporate citizen. In what might best be described as aspirational thinking, he began to say, “I don’t know if anyone hates the Weather Channel.”

Mr. Kenny brightly contradicted him. “Oh, they do!” he said.

Mr. Kenny explained that he and his colleagues had been reading the angry online reactions to the acquisition. But, he added, “I think that once they see that we’re only investing in the product, not changing it or dumbing it down or altering it in some way, then I think that will go away.”

Mr. Steremberg insisted, “This will be a better change, a good change.” Weather Underground will have more money to build weather models and to invest in Web design improvements. It will stay online as its own brand, he said, one that will be complementary to the Weather Channel’s.

A small but vocal minority of people, he said glumly, are “resistant to change in general.” They should know, he said, that “change is inevitable.”

If nothing else, the weather teaches us that much.