Social Networking On Wheels (SNOW)

This is just a brief refresher on how the social network mask part of the Texxi scheme will work in practice. It is an integral part of the scheduling system and offers superior performance to existing public transport. This is because you are known to the system and will be matched with travelling companions based on your travel groups and various ratings systems which form your travel network.

Travel groups allow you to travel with people with whom you have a fuller trust relationship across a variety of interactions. You are likely to know them outside the travel space. A ratings system provides for the ability to travel with many more people who will be decent travel companions, but with whom trust on any other kind of transaction or interaction is unknown and not necessarily desired to be known.

The customer has an incentive to start building and improving on their travel networks in a continuous cycle from the first time they travel with Texxi.  The cycle is one of travelling and then rating the fellow passengers and the driver and finally forming specific people into travel groups and then repeating. The customer can cut into the cycle by forming some travel groups first , thereby improving their experience immediately. They will also be able to take advantage of general ratings that passengers have built up over time with other customers of the system. As this is a peer-to-peer trust or credit system nothing is done by edict. Indeed the ideal travelling companion of one person might not be the best companion for another. However, over a larger set of individual ratings one is able to build a fair picture of who is a good person to be grouped with other specific people. If a passenger is simply obnoxious then they will quickly find that they cannot travel within the scheme at all and will have to improve their behaviour to do so. A passenger who is overly particular about who they travel with will find that they are still able to travel but may end up travelling in smaller groups and paying a higher fare for the privilege.

As one can see this all occurs as part of a naturally balanced, self-adjusting system and does not require outside manipulation which would be highly detrimental. In other words, it is a sensibly engineered trust or credit system. Practically the companion ratings and forming of travel groups can occur as a seamlessly integrated activity within any existing networking site such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace , Bebo and others via a Texxi module or application. This is an important leveraging of peoples choices about how they will network online. It can also occur directly via Texxi. For those of a technical bent, Open Social appears to be an emerging standard in this space.

The customer having completed a journey is presented with a record of this trip information online and can then vote on the passengers and driver. This is absolutely essential as it will directly improve the passengers travel experience from as soon as the next time they travel. In the Evening & Night mode, the marking of passengers is represented by a trendy security wristband with lettering so that they can be identified later. This is if the companions are not fully known to you. The precise choice of implementation is as much a marketing decision across modes as anything else. The remaining “magic” occurs in the scheduling itself which whilst aggregating passengers into groups will simultaneously draw upon all this information to deliver the best possible travel experience it can.