Just as we had one reader complaining that the text messages from our SMS arrival service are too verbose (not because of us) another reader clued me in to an alternative service called TextMarks.

Since we had already developed the terse output for 411sync, it was pretty simple to get an interface to TextMarks going. You can try it out by sending a text message to 41411 with a message body of:

trimet <stop_id>

That’s exactly the same format of message as the 411sync interface.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Why choose one over the other? There are a few pros and cons:

TextMarks: shorter address (5 digit vs. 10 digit) and terser response, but, it’s also limited to 125 characters max, so you’ll lose some info at stops that have multiple lines serving them.

411sync: more junk in response message, but will send longer responses by splitting across multiple txt messages. Also offers the same interface via e-mail (not sure how important that is).

Vote with your thumbs :-)