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):