mishmap

Hyperlocality from Nano to Astro! (or life imitates web)

Posted on June 28th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mobile, hyperlocal.

Be sure to read Harvey Feldspar’s recent geoblog about the impact of location-awareness:

“Hyperlocality is transforming our lives at every scale: bodyware, roomware, streetware, cityware, nationware, and global ware. From nano to astro!”

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event recommendations by mobile social networks

Posted on May 19th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mashups, mobile, social networks.

A mobile social network can recommend events of interest by analyzing information from users with similar profiles. For example:
Miguel, a gay 30 year old New Yorker vacationing in San Francisco, wakes up on Sunday morning wondering what to do. His cell phone beeps with a text message suggesting that he visits Dolores Park later that afternoon.

This suggestion was made because his social network has data that on hot and sunny Sunday afternoons in San Francisco, hundreds of gay men in a social network spend time in Dolores Park.

Let’s deconstruct how the social network arrived at this conclusion:

• In the past 6 months, hundreds of people used their mobile device to access the network from Dolores Park. It knows this because the phone communicates the user’s GPS coordinate. Many phones already have this capability, either built in or through a bluetooth connection with a GPS.
• Whenever a member accesses the social network, it logs the time. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park occur on Sunday afternoons, between 2pm and 5pm.
• On each access, the network contacts an online weather service and logs the weather condition and temperature. Many of these accesses from Dolores Park on Sunday afternoons occur on sunny days above 65°.
• Many of these network accesses correspond to gay men between 25 and 40 years old, as specified in their user profile under “orientation” and “age”.

By collecting data about how and when members use a service, social networks can creatively analyze and find patterns useful to the community. Furthermore, when Miguel arrives at Dolores Park, I would expect the network to facilitate a meeting with other like-minded members nearby.

Update: Related to this, check out this posting describing GyPSii, a social network that tracks users’ GPS location

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Smells like collective intelligence

Posted on April 20th, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: mobile, spatial annnotation.

At Mobile Monday earlier this week, Ajit Jaokar focused on UGC (user generated content), what he calls the “holy grail” of mobile web 2.0.

Instead of waiting for carriers to uniformly open up GPS triangulation to consumers through their APIs, he encouraged developers to take advantage of the falling prices of GPS components. They should consider using a pocket bluetooth GPS to interact effectively with their cell-phone hosted location-aware UGC application.

What kind of applications?

1. Identify unknown images in a photograph using historic tagged metadata. Ajit describes a related thought experiment on his blog, but the gist of it is that you can search a photo website for previous photo tags at the same location to determine blurry features in your own picture.
2. Infer memorable events by looking for data thresholds. This is a bit of a thought experiment as well and certainly unnecessary given the invention of AM radio, but hear me out. I’m not intimately familiar with Flickr’s API, but imagine the following:
   • Let’s assume we live in a world where photos are instantaneously uploaded to a photo website from a wireless capable camera.
   • You setup a location-sensitive “trigger” to send you an SMS to your cell phone Twitter-style.
   • You setup a Flickr “rule” like “Send me a text message when Flickr receives 500 photos in a 10 second interval from AT&T Park (where the San Francisco Giants play baseball) over the next 10 days”

   You’ve just subscribed to be the first one to know when Barry Bonds beats Hank Aaron’s home run record! Furthermore, you could subscribe to the feed associated with those pictures.

   I believe that this concept is powerful and can be more generalized. I could subscribe to any Flickr photo feed when a certain threshold of pictures taken has been exceeded in a short time interval. Even if we remove that futuristic assumption that photos are immediately beamed to Flickr, the rule is still useful as long as the GPS coordinate and timestamp are preserved upon upload.

3. Integrate olfactory devices and GPS (I am half joking here). By mashing up smells and locations, one can broadcast the existence of restaurants, gas leaks, fires, etc. It sure smells like UGC

To summarize, by capturing aggregated user generated content in the form of tags, time, subject context and smell (!), we can infer potentially useful information.

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