Don’t have time to start a placeblog? Neither do I. But now, thanks to outside.in Radar, Twitter and Summize, we can placetweet. Placetweeting? I’ve got time for that.
Three services being interconnected in ways that I don't believe any of them initially thought about could create value. Now once they start using switchabit . . . .How does it work?
You just twitter like you normally do, but include the neighborhood you’re twittering about, and if you want to take it a step further, the name of the venue you’re twittering about.
Then, via the magic of the summize api and outside.in’s place detection algorithms, your tweet will be detected, matched to those locations, and will show up in people’s Radar in those areas.
So for example, this recent tweet:
ericgardenfork tweets: even people in the Tea Lounge Park Slope Brooklyn are talking about Tiger woods
just popped onto the Radar of everyone in Park Slope, and it got attached to the cafe Tea Lounge in that neighborhood. It’s being read right now by everyone in that part of Brooklyn, informing them about their local area.
That’s a pretty low bar for getting involved in the hyperlocal scene. I may not ever really be a placeblogger, but I’ve already become a placetweeter.
Sounds like my kind of service--no additional work required of me as a user and engineers taking on the burden of adding the geo data.
ReplyDeleteBut how good is outside.in's place detection algorithm? I honestly would never tweet "Tea Lounge Park Slope Brooklyn"--my tweets are more like "at schiller's eating dinner with my sis" or "the les is bumping today." How close is outside.in to being able to geotag stuff like that? Are they doing anything creative like looking through past tweets to try to infer where I might be if there's not sufficient information in my latest tweet? Eg, tweet 1, "heading to the Bronx," tweet 2, "at the stadium," can they put me at Yankee's stadium? I'm sure they're not that far yet, but you get the idea of where I'm going with it.
Does outside.in have an API for place detection? I can see that being very useful in a host of contexts other than twitter--they should open that service up.
On a tangential note: when you gonna add disqus to this blog? I forgot how much of a barrier the Blogger commenting popup is to actually placing a comment, since most of the blogs I've been reading/commenting on lately have disqus.
Hey Kortina,
ReplyDeleteGood questions! The outside.in Radar/Twitter tie-in is pretty rudimentary at this stage - it's only a week old as of now. We're going to build a lot more into it though.
In particular, to your point about not wanting to write "lewer east side" every time, we will start recognizing common abbreviations where possible, and also potentially allowing people to specify their own personal abbreviations for certain places.
And as far as opening up place detection goes, expect to see something from us on that very soon.
John Geraci
co-founder, outside.in