Social Media Research Blog

Geolocation and Twitter: Realtime meets Local

Recently, twitter announced that it was going to add support for geo annotations for tweets. The original announcement is on twitter blog.

One fascinating thing about Twitter is how the community is involved in shaping the way the product itself evolves. There are several examples of how this happens:

• For conversations, the community evolved method of @ replies.
• Retweets have become a great way to pass information along and attribute it to the person who provided this information.
• Hashtags are becoming even more popular, with almost a handful of hashtags landing up on the twitter homepage everyday.
• Location is'nt new either. Many users already provide the location information in their profiles. In addition several formats have evolved where L: is the most popular method for indicating the current location of a user. This was partly popularized by the Twittervision application.

By standardizing the support for geolocation in twitter, the service provides developers with several opportunities to build applications that are geographically relevant. One possibility for twitter is to capitalize on the wealth of user generated geodata:

1. Think realtime meets local: It would be great for instance, to know that there is a live concert that everyone in my town is talking about right now!
2. Local Advertising: This could be one direction that Twitter might be heading towards.
3. Hyperlocal News and Activism: Social media is defining new ways to share hyperlocal news and build community involvement. Twitter is being used by several NGOs, blood banks and Local Police as a means to bring awareness and build campaigns. Applications built using geolocation information can accelerate involvement and social good at a local level.

BTW, here is an interesting stat about twitter users: From a large collection of twitter profile pages I find that roughly 60% of them have some URL associated with the profile. AND of those that have a profile URL, 92% already declare some location for themselves (irrespective of whether the location can be resolved correctly or not). While many worry about the fact that our location privacy is being lost forever; like any technology, it will ultimately be up to the community to come to a consensus on what is acceptable. For most part, I think that users are happy to share their location at some level of general granularity, in exchange of some (perhaps perceived) social value (meeting friends, finding local hangouts or for simply being a bit exhibitionist about what you are currently upto!).

Geolocating blogs

A quick note:

Clay Finkand colleagues from UMBC have a new paper on "Geolocating Blogs From Their Textual Content". From the abstract:

"Mashups showing the geographic location of the authors of social media content are popular. They generally depend on the authors reporting their own location. For blogs, auto-mated geolocation strategies using IP address and domain name are not adequate for determining an author’s location. Instead, we detail textual geolocation techniques suitable for tagging social media data, facilitating development of geo-graphic mashups and spatial reasoning tools."

As noted in this paper, trying to geolocate blogs from IP addresses or domain names does not work well due to many blogs mapping to various hosting services. To locate the named entities that refer to a potential location, the authors use GeoNames (This is a really great, free resource for those working with geographical analysis). The location of the blogger is disambiguated by clustering occurances of different geographical named entities in a region. From the paper:

For example, if “Maryland” has already been disambiguated as the U.S. state of Maryland, then the text “Laurel, Maryland” leads us to disambiguate “Laurel” as Laurel, Maryland.

Location is an important element in social media analysis and any results (for example, sentiment analysis or trends) that could be pivoted on this dimension are especially useful in providing an insight into what people in different regions think about a particular topic.

In context of this work, there are a few more related papers (in addition to references in this paper) one might want to check out. Although these papers dont address the same issue, they are interesting from the perspective of location analysis:

• Recent study of "Iran's online public" by Harvard researchers.
• "Spatial variation in search queries" by Backstrom et al.
• A study of blog commentsof persian bloggers by Noor Ali Hasan
• In our work with twitter analysis, we did some basic mapping of location names mentioned in user profiles to lat/long coordinates using Yahoo API.

CFP: Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2009)

With the popularity of geolocation, mobile search, iphone/Andrioid apps, local advertising, location information is playing an important role in social media today. We have started sharing our location information on the web and via mobile devices through a number of services -- FireEagle, Brightkite, twitter, loopt, dopplr, Whrrl, geohash, citysense -- just to name a few. (phew!)

The "Second International Workshop on Location and the Web (LocWeb 2009)" to be held in conjunction with CHI 2009 (Boston, MA) looks like a very interesting venue to discuss ideas and research related to this topic.

From the CFP

Workshop Website: http://ifgi.uni-muenster.de/locweb2009/
Position Paper Submission Deadline: October 23, 2008

Overview

The goal of the Second International Workshop on Location and the Web
(LocWeb 2009) is to bring together researchers to discuss the ways in which
location as a first-class concept in Web services and Web applications will
transform the Web into a location-aware information system. We are
particularly interested in how location concepts can be shared across
applications to provide adequate support for an evolving ecosystem of
location-aware services and applications.

This event has been updated in the Social Media events calendar.

Semantic Ecoblogging and Citizen Science

Today during our weekly eBiquity lab group meetings, Joel Sachs updated us on the Spire project. Spire is a research project investigating how semantic web technologies can be used to support science in general and the field of ecoinformatics in particular. During lunch, Joel and I talked about crowdsourcing and how social media and citizen science can help innovation and discovery in scientific applications. Many of the tasks of a field researcher involves tedious and careful logging of the ecology and habitat in an environment. This is exactly where amateur scientists and hobbyists can make a big difference and contribute to science. Most amateurs contribute to such projects, just because they enjoy it and love working on it as a hobby. One example of how crowdsourcing is currently done in Spire is through: Splickr tool: that allows you to query for geotagged photos on Flickr. Spotter tool: "Spotter allows you to easily create RDF/OWL for species observations. It places a button on your Firefox toolbar that calls up a form with fields taken from our observation ontology (Observer, Reporter, Location, Common Name, Scientific Name, etc.)." (description quoted from the site) While reading the book crowdsourcing, I learned of similar efforts by NASA, and Cornell University's Ornithology lab. Many discoveries in science are now coming from amateur researchers -- ant not just from folks with multi-million dollar grants backing them. A few examples from the book are: InnoCentive many open research problems are being solved by a part-time-hobbyist-amateur type researchers. INSPIRE NASA is harnessing wisdom of the crowds to help analyze images The rediscovery of Cozumel Thrasher, a rare bird species by a bunch of amateur birders. And many more examples .... (I really recommend reading the book - it is well written and you will not be able to put it down!) During the meeting and later, we were intrigued by the idea of developing an iPhone app to allow researchers and 'citizen scientists' to take pictures of species in the wild and upload them to spire. One important point here is that often an amateur researcher might not be aware of the scientific name of a species, but given we have enough eyes looking at the data being uploaded, we can divide the task of labeling and categorizing the findings. Citizen scientists can contribute at various levels -- performing field studies, annotating, building ontologies, etc. Since, Spire is a Semantic Web application backed by ontologies, one can now reason over the findings and learn that an invasive species is posing a significant threat to the local habitat. This is the ultimate aim of Spire and to me, this is the killer app for Web 3.0 -- if you really insist on a term like that! For more information on Spire please refer to the following publications.

Geo-Location Based Music Playlists

What if you could geo-code every song you heard on your iPhone/MP3 device and share it with everyone? Could we then build geo-location based music playlists? Know any sites that already do something like this?

Last.fm to some extent supports basic geo-information and can provide recommendations for events and show the top artists and tracks for each country. But what I am thinking of is more detailed than this: Sort of like saying "Hey! I wonder what are the cool music vibes at San Fransisco right now?" or when sitting at the waterfront in downtown Baltimore; "I wonder what folks like to listen to while watching the ocean?".

We geo-tag our images, videos and profiles -- so why not music too? Imagine going on a road trip and "tuning in to" to any "local station" as you travel from one state to another. Or a heat-map interface that would show the type of music that is trendy in each location -- and the ability to query which are the top songs for any place by genre. I think Last.fm would be a great platform to implement this, since they perhaps already have a location associated with each profile.

BTW, here is a Google Maps mashup built using the Last.fm API that shows which are the two countries that have the most similar musical taste. If you know any cool music+geolocation mashup sites, I would love to know about them!

Some things are just Semi-Social

Social Media is a lot about sharing. Prior to the growth of social software, it wasn't that people did not share stuff -- they just did it offline or via email. Now we share at a massive scale and a lot more easily. 

Some things we are willing to share "openly"

• Music playlists (Last.fm)
• Books we read (iread, shelfari)
• Calendars and Travel plans (google calendar)
• Status updates (via Twitter and Microblogging)
• Restaurant recommendations (yelp)
• Knowledge and expertise (via Wikipedia)

As we start to experiment with social software we realize that sharing is good and soon become open to sharing a lot more. There are some things though, that just seem semi-social. What I mean by Semi-Social is roughly "Thing I would not mind sharing with a small group of trusted friends and family members".

Until just a few years back there would have been a lot more people squirming if they were asked to share such 'sensitive data' with others. I see this perception slowly eroding away. There is a small, albeit enthusiastic bunch experimenting with new tools that fall into the category of Semi-Social. 

Some cases that I can think of are as follows:

• Investment portfolio: One example is Covestor. I have an account there but it is under pseudonym. I would not be that enthusiastic to reveal my pathetic attempt to bet on the stock market by watching (mostly tech) blogs. sigh!
• TV watching habits: I think Television as we know it today is completely broken. There is no social aspect to it whatsoever. At ICWSM, Noor Ali-Hassan presented a paper on "Social Media Scenarios for Television". What struck me about this talk was her statement that "Despite its social nature, there is a private aspect of TV that people want to preserve".
• Income and financial information: This is something we had least anticipated. How did we get to a point where I am actually not that scared while putting all my bank details and credit card information into a site like Mint? Mint is not a social site as such. But it reflects how we are now willing to part with some really sensitive data. In contrast, there are other examples of recruitment sites like SimplyHired where people reveal their salary information and can search for companies by salary. A more recent startup that is quite similar is Glassdoor.
• Location: Location can be an extremely sensitive piece of information. Fortunately, Yahoo's fireeagle provides access control for various applications and one can set the privilege that each app has to access location information (latlong, zip, state, country etc).

There will always be some who are at the extreme end of the spectrum and are quite comfortable with being completely (publicly) transparent about "sensitive data". However, most would still only dare to share some of this data with close friends and select people -- i.e. if there is enough value proposition in it for them. Some would be comfortable with aggregate analysis over the data as long as they are not personally identified or targeted in some way (advertising or otherwise).

Although it requires a great deal of courage (to work with privacy sensitive data), the opportunity to invent in the semi-social space may be quite a bit.

My First FireEagle App: Pizza Coupons Search

Yesterday, I discussed an idea around the FireEagle geolocation API. I was envisioning an app where you could have a mobile phone and as you walk down the Mall or any location, it would pre-fetch relevant coupons and offers from the local restaurants. Being a grad student, we always learn to find good Pizza deals online. So I decided to use the FireEagle API to develop a Pizza  coupon finder. The way it works is that it authenticates with FireEagle to access your current location and then fetches the coupons from Google Maps and then parses the output to display on your mobile phone or a browser. You can try it at the following URL  http://wikimatix.com/coupon/pizza.php
if you have a FireEagle account already. First the application will try to authenticate with FireEagle and request the appropriate permission to access the exact or approximate location information and then passes this to the Google Coupon Finder.

Finally you have all the coupons you need to order your fresh pizza. The Documentation and example walkthrough code on FireEagle's developer area is excellent. It took hardly any time to put together this demo!

I think that the possibilities that this opens up for mobile advertising are exciting. We should also keep an eye on Android -- this space is gonna be fun to watch. [Update: Fixed the broken link. Sorry]

Yahoo FireEagle: Geolocation made simple

This service is currently in alpha but thanks to Pranam Kolari I was able to get an invitation to Yahoo!'s FireEagle platform. FireEagle is an easy way to manage and share location information across many applications. Currently, I publish my location information across many different sites and applications and it is rare that I put in the actual effort to update it everywhere. For example I use Dopplr to publish my travel plans, twitter and Brightkite to update my current location and Facebook to indicate my home address and other details. I was impressed with how easy it was (using OAuth) to allow Dopplr and others to share and access information with FireEagle. If you have a GPS enabled phone you can even update the geolocation on the go! Damn! Thats is neat!

One really compelling application is Wikinear.com -- it shows you the nearest places of interest by matching the location information obtained from FireEagle with Wikipedia entries. This is great especially if you are traveling to a new location or a tourist spot and would like to know the places of interest nearby.

Another very cool application is Metosphere. (PS: I wish I had an iPhone!). With this app, you can leave a digital message for a given location, see places and events of interest and even report Graffiti and City Repair! This gives me a reason to believe that the next big thing is going to be mobile advertising. The advantage of easy availability of geolocation information specific to a user is immense. This reminds me of a project at eBiquity research group a few years back, called Agents2go,  that talked about a very similar concept. Imagine that you were walking down the during lunch and the agent on your iPhone would automatically collect coupons or find deals at the nearest restaurants as you walk by. The idea that we can have a query free, geographically relevant search is really exciting. Yahoo! is innovating and pushing hard on the open initiative. With the availability of an API it would be fun to integrate Google Coupons! (OK here is one more fascinating idea and little time at hand!)

Location is a very sensitive piece of information and the best part of FireEagle is that you can manage permissions and privacy settings or even temporarily stop sharing your location. You can allow a specific application to only access location information at a certain granularity: exact, zip, neighborhood, state or even country.  More at Techcrunch.