Author: Alan

The Wellingtonista & Twitter’s Lists

We’ve talked about Twit­ter before – we’re on it, of course, as over a thou­sand of you already know. Over time Twit­ter has evolved from a WTF? (back then at the same stage in its life as Google Wave is now) to an indis­pens­ible part of our social net­work­ing land­scape.

If you’ve logged on to Twit­ter recently you’ll have seen their new­est fea­ture, Twit­ter Lists. These are a way to group up oth­er Twit­ter users, both among the people you fol­low and the people you don’t. You might want to group up some of your friends; or make a list of your favour­ite bands; then you can con­veni­ently view just those tweets from those people.

Where this becomes inter­est­ing is that it’s pos­sible to fol­low oth­er people’s lists. A nice example of this is @webstock’s Speak­ers List – a List of speak­ers at past and future Web­stock events. Fol­low­ing this list allows you to immerse your­self in the whole Web­stock vibe, months in advance of the event itself! Very handy.

Of course The Wel­ling­tonista is not to be left out of this action. It can be quite hard to find the best people to fol­low on Twit­ter – so let us do it for you! We have com­piled some must-fol­low Wel­ling­ton-themed lists for you to fol­low, with more on the way.

• @wellingtonista/team – Us! Or at least, the large sub­set of us who are on Twit­ter. We are, of course, all well worth fol­low­ing indi­vidu­ally, but fol­low­ing the list is prob­ably easi­er.
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-music – Loc­ally based musi­cians, ven­ues and record shops. Why aren’t there more out there?
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-theatres – A mix of cinemas and play­houses. Good for find­ing out what’s on, and wheth­er there’s any com­pet­i­tions, spe­cials or oth­er pro­mo­tions run­ning.
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-food-and-drink – all the cafés, bars, ven­ues, res­taur­ants and bottlestores we could find. The inter­play between the vari­ous cafés in par­tic­u­lar is quite nice and col­legi­al and almost war­rants its own List, really.
• @wellingtonista/wgtn-events – Events. You know what they are: Fest­ivals; Mar­kets; Car­ni­vals. And the occa­sion­al, uh, sport­ing event.

Clearly these lists could do with a little fine tun­ing, as well as addi­tions. So let us know!

Snapper, re-visited

It’s been a long time since we’ve men­tioned Snap­per in these pages.

In the mean­time it’s become so much of an every­day part of life in Wel­ling­ton now that it hardly seems worth men­tion­ing any­more. Or is it?

Recently we got an email from Snap­per ask­ing us if we’d like to come and see what they’re up to. It seems they’ve had a few oth­er things on the go as well as the recent Val­ley Fly­er con­ver­sion and they’d like to let us know about them.

Sounds good. But it does­n’t have to be a one way thing. Now’s our chance to ask Snap­per what they’re doing to bring some of our pub­lic trans­port “most needed” items into real­ity:

• fully integ­rated tick­et­ing across all pub­lic trans­port pro­viders in the Wel­ling­ton region, and
• our bus stops equipped with real time bus inform­a­tion – we may not want much, but we want the best, and at the moment we have to admit that Christ­ch­urch, at least in part, Has It.

What about you? If you could ask the Snap­per people a ques­tion, what would it be? Is there some­thing you’d like changed? Is there any­thing about the present sys­tem that bugs you?

Let us know, below, and we’ll pass it along.

snapped? (wha)

It’s been a couple weeks since we last checked in on Snap­per.

The Snap­per rol­lout has con­tin­ued apace, and some of us haven’t used our old ten-trips for two whole weeks! (Well, we were excited about this, any­way.)

More and more people are board­ing buses armed with the cards; and more and more buses (and their drivers) are ready to take them.

And in the mean­time we’ve learnt many things. (Read on for more.)

snapped? (toru)

Today, read­er Dav­eK let us know that Snap­per cards have finally gone on sale at a couple of retail­ers in town, at least. They’re also avail­able, along with the card read­ers that allow WinIE types to do refills at home, from the Snap­per web­site.

Of course there’s been a few more teeth­ing troubles repor­ted; dif­fi­cult ques­tions haven’t been answered; not all buses (or drivers for that mat­ter) seem to be enabled for the new tech­no­logy; and retail­ers still don’t seem all that fussed. Mean­while, as Poneke has repor­ted, the 10-trip tick­ets will be with­drawn from sale from August 29.

But while the whole thing seems very much a work in pro­gress, we’re just glad they’ve star­ted on the rol­lout to us, the pub­lic trans­port punters. It’s the Future™, you know.

So in the spir­it of the week we’re in, we’ll offer some words of encour­age­ment:

He ika kai ake i raro, he rāpaki ake i raro.

snapped? (rua)

So we can con­firm that yes, the new Snap­per cards do work pretty well in the buses (based on the small sample of one attempt earli­er today using our tri­al USB snap­per pic­tured). One would expect so, giv­en that the tech­no­logy comes from the giant T‑Money install in Seoul, where their mega-city sized pub­lic trans­port oper­a­tion will have smoothed all the rough-edges out of it long ago.

But WTF is hap­pen­ing with Snap­per?

First, the Dom Post reports that the rol­lout, due for Monday 14th, has been delayed again (ori­gin­ally the rol­lout was sup­posed to be in June). Then we find that at least some buses are run­ning with live, lit-up and useable Snap­per read­ers any­way – such was the one we caught this morn­ing. And to con­fuse the mat­ter fur­ther, no retail­ers appear able to sell com­muters the cards until the end of the month… well, those retail­ers that actu­ally have agreed to sell the things in the first place, that is.

But… we wants it!

So what might have caused this Clayton’s delay? In the absence of any­thing use­ful from Snap­per them­selves we can, of course, indulge in wild spec­u­la­tion (after the jump):