Find yourself in New York City without an airport ride, but don't want to pony up the disheartening full fare for a cab ride? Hitchsters.com hooks you up with other taxi riders taking the same flight to save money and ensure you arrive on time. The benefit over an airline-sponsored shuttle van is that your fellow passengers are trying to make the same flight, so you won't have to hop on two hours early or risk missing your take-off. The service is currently live for Manhattan and Brooklyn pick-ups, but plans to expand. Thanks, Jason!

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Link-shortening services like TinyURL have become nearly ubiquitous in space-restricted places like email, Twitter, and mobile sites—which is why it's odd it's taken so long for a similar service to offer traffic tracking, thumbnail caching, or other advanced services. Free URL shrinker Bit.ly jumps into that void with a slick set of features. The site remembers the last 15 links you shortened on your landing site, and it stores a thumbnail graphic of each link on its own space. Obsessive traffic-watchers can see how many have clicked through their links, where they found them, and compile all that data from simple XML or JSON feeds. There's a handy bookmarklet for quick Bit.ly conversion, and the developers are working on geo-locating features for the near future. All in all, a viable link-snipping service for web workers and info geeks.

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Visiting New York and wondering whether a crosstown cab is any faster than the subway? Mobile|Traffic, a free web service for mobile phones (and standard browsers as well) offers updates from more than 4,600 traffic cameras in seven countries, including the U.S., U.K., and Australia. Simply navigate from country to state/province to city, and you'll get a recent shot of the intersection. Using Mobile|Traffic from a phone requires a data plan, as you'd imagine, and, as MakeUseOf points out, it's in serious need of map and search functions. But it's simple, free, and pretty useful if you don't always trust vague traffic reports of "moving steadily" and the like.

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US-centric: Hot on the heels of Windows Live Maps' traffic-based directions, Google Maps unleashes its own traffic predictions. To use it, just click the Traffic button on the top of a map and then click the change link to... Read More »

US-centric: Windows Live Maps has added a new feature called Clearflow, which suggests routes based on traffic conditions with the intention of getting you where you need to go quickly and with a minimum of traffic congestion. Rather than... Read More »

Free social commuter alert service Commuter Feed harnesses the quick and brief nature of Twitter to offer commuters in major metro areas a way of avoiding train delays, subway break-downs, and other travel information in nearly-real time. The service has one of the most extensive lists of metro areas covered of its type, although each is only as useful as the number of dedicated Twitterers on their daily routes. If you know how to follow or reply on the micro-message service, you can easily join and submit to any metro area's feed, although how you handle the surfeit of Twits in the more populous areas is up to you. For similar community-driven commuter help, check out The Clever Commute.

AU - I checked out Commuter Feed's website and while it's set up to accommodate Australian users, so far only 1 tweet has been recorded in Sydney - about the fire at Broadway Shopping Centre which happened yesterday. It's good to know that it's there if we want to use it though!

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