Twittermood is a project started by a multidisciplinary group of researchers from Northeastern and Harvard that seeks to understand the relationship between mood and geography through complex Tweet analysis.
In analogy to individual neurons firing together to add up to the human consciousness, the billions of tweets have meaningful macro-states that contain information about the whole system rather than the individual tweeters. But we need to do a little data mining to extract meaningful information about these states, to expose our collective states of mind.
(Sune Lehmann via Complexity and Social Networking Blog)
This poster summarizes the team’s findings thus far:
As part of the project, they created the following tvideo, documenting a 24-hour mood cycle on Twitter:
A wonderful translation of myriad data points into something insightful.
Released last week by Iryss, TagWhat is a web interface and mobile app that enables users to create their own AR networks:
Tagwhat users place digital tags anywhere on the Earth, from their street corner to another continent. By simply holding up the camera view of a mobile device (iPhone or Android), geo-contextual tags from pre-selected friends and community members become visible. Walk down the street and Tagwhat reveals a wealth of relevant information, discussions, and deals — such as a coupon for a nearby establishment, a discussion thread for a meet-up with friends, and a restaurant review about a sushi place around the corner.
At the heart of the Tagwhat network is its patent-pending augmented reality technology that lets users leave behind digital crumbs (tags) for any location, place or thing, anywhere in the world for friends and followers to discover. Each marker is an interactive social object, and can include direct action links to email, phone, SMS, photos, URL’s, cross-posting to Twitter, Facebook, and more.
(via PitchEngine)
It appears that the app is available now for iPhones and Android devices.
One effect of this technology for brands: it is becoming easier and easier to curate experiences of physical space (e.g. a tour or a scavenger hunt) using pre-existing tools; TagWhat maps can be created and dynamically amended with no outside assistance from developers. Awesome.
If you’ve ever wondered what New York would look like inside a NES game, Brett Camper has the answer with 8-Bit NYC. He aims to create maps for other major cities with a little help from the crowd over at kickstarter.
New click and drag controls make it easy to navigate through user contributed photos in Street View. Click or drag the silver orbs in the direction you want to look. See what’s to the left, right, up, or down.
Currentcity, an initiative of Senseable City Lab at MIT is working with mobile operators and data providers to build applications that address city management problems. Using anonymized mobile phone location data they measure the patterns of human activity in urban environments.
Below is a video of real-time visualization of SMS exchanges in Amsterdam. Each dot represents a message sent. There is a huge spike on 12/31/07 during the turn of the new year.
This is a pretty cool new feature of Bing maps that mashes up tagged photo’s from Flickr with Photosynth, Street view images and data overlays to give you a richer experience and understanding of a particular location. You can read more about the thinking behind it on their blog here.
I don’t think I’m alone in using Google Streetview to check out places I’d like to travel to (like the New Orleans Garden District, Paris or Hawaii). It has to be some of the best armchair traveling out there, as close as you can get to walking down a street and checking things out without actually being there.
Cool on its own, there could be other ways to integrate this:
* Integration of Google Streetview within a site that was location-focused, like Summit on the Summit, scavenger hunts, travel-related, etc.
* Using Google Streetview to encourage armchair traveling. Show cool locations to explore within Streetview, offer suggestions along the way.
* Streetview of any event our client was involved in (may take a partnership with Google and would only be suitable for certain kinds of events, like music festivals etc)
