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.
Clearly these lists could do with a little fine tuning, as well as additions. So let us know!
Wellington is blessed with many and splendiferous forms of avifauna. Between the Sanctuary; the council’s efforts in keeping pest numbers low; and the natural attractions of our location, Wellington is party central for birds.
And so it is only fitting that the Wellingtonista takes at least a passing interest in Forest & Bird’s Bird of the Year Poll, given that some of our favourite residents are top candidates!
In truth though we’ve had some difficulty deciding if we should endorse one particular bird over another. One person wanted the Robin; another the Tomtit; and another suggested a non-resident left-field contender, the now extinct and totally not eponymous of any Wellingtonista alive or dead Chatham Island Whaktard (which is only a half-decent FaceBook campaign away from being the poll winner that cannot be admitted to).
It turns out though, that the person that writes the blog posting gets to decide, and thus I would urge you all to vote for the Kārearea (New Zealand Falcon).
Why? After the jump.
At SXSW 2007, the cool new thing that got everyone talking was Twitter, and we know how that ended up. This year’s cool new thing was foursquare, a location sharing social networking app with gaming elements, and many people wondered when it might come to New Zealand.
Well, it’s not here yet. But recently, local dev legend Ben Nolan dropped us a line to let us know about Twitterplaces, an open-source variant on the foursquare theme that he’s been working on.
(When we last mentioned Ben he’d just put together one of the first ever Facebook applications. This was of course many months before we all got collectively tired of being pirates and throwing cows at each other; thankfully, Ben’s application contained neither.)
What to do when one’s parents come to town and want to take you out to dinner? We usually quiz our fellow Wellingtonistæ around the office watercooler: there’s always an opinion or three on a subject like this.
Given we had to cope with a not terribly adventurous (in the culinary sense) older bloke, and two small kids, where could we go that was classy yet satisfy our varying requirements? There were many good suggestions:
Here’s just a quick reminder that the Smarten your Snapper competition closes in a week’s time, on Thursday 27th August.
This means there’s still time for you to get busy on an entry. Check out the Craft 2.0 blog for some inspiration, or, think about this…
The new Green Snapper cards have been released for sale in Wellington this week. This means there will soon be thousands of school-age kids out there needing help to look after a hard-to-handle object that is valued (by their parents, at least). There’s got to be opportunities there for some inspired, and potentially rewarding, crafting!
For example, this Wellingtonista would queue, just behind his daughters, to help buy them a couple of robust and pretty holders on a lanyard at the next Craft 2.0…
A few weeks ago, when we went to talk to Snapper, one of us mentioned how many people we see using cards still fastidiously wrapped in their original clear plastic wrapping.
We thought that, just like the plastic couch covers your house-proud aunt never ever did remove from her new lounge suite, these wrappings need to be torn off, and the card within liberated and made personal.
Well, it now turns out that thanks to Craft 2.0, the solution to this problem is at hand. It involves you.
Craft 2.0 are running the Smarten Your Snapper competition. All you need to do is make some sort of nifty cover, holder, or cosy for your Snapper card (or Snapper USB) and enter it into the competition for a chance to win a new Snapper card pre-loaded with $100. In addition, you could win a table at the next Craft2.0 at the Dowse, giving you a place to market your creation.
Full details are on the Craft 2.0 website, together with a couple of starter ideas.
Get busy: competition entries close on September 1 August 27!
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:
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.
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.)
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.
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):