It was January of 2006, the morning after Josh Crandall had endured a hellish commute to his home in Montclair, N.J., from his office in Manhattan. He was standing on the train platform, waiting to go back to work, surrounded by fellow commuters, all of whom were tapping away at their BlackBerries (Stock Quote: RIMM).

Josh had a thought.

“It dawned on me that we are technically all connected,” he says. “I wondered: ‘Could we have helped each other last night?’”

This was the genesis of what would become CleverCommute.com, a free Web site and online community that connects thousands of commuters and allows them to update one another on the status of mass transit services in real time.

Josh approached five guys who he “kind of” knew from around the neighborhood and they put the plan into action. Josh would create a kind of a private online newsgroup. Members would e-mail commuter updates to a single e-mail address and every member of the group would receive it. Trains running late? Bus stuck in traffic? Every member would know as soon as one knew.

At the time Josh was working as a VP at Morgan Stanley (Stock Quote: MS) in the office of the Chief Technology Officer, so he had the skills to build the site himself (his technology is patent pending).

Since 2006, the site has grown in an organic, viral sort of way, from five guys in Montclair to more than 6,000 members across New Jersey, New York City, the suburbs north of the city and Long Island. Additional cities have been added to the network too: Portland, Ore., Boston and Chicago. Each transit line has its own group, including buses, rail, light rail, subways and even highways.

Since its inception, the site has gained both a formal name - Clever Commute - and a business model.