Placetweeting

Screw all manner of betaworks' objectivity, this is pretty cool - John Geraci:

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.

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.

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 . . . .

The Velocity of Data

While eating Chicken Adobo at Cendrillion every other day for the past 6 months, we talk constantly about the value of data - how can an application or a technology create value to an existing or new group of users through the creative aggregation, manipulation or structuring of data.

One of the favorite theoretical examples we use is the ability of an application to add structure to unstructured data. And, in particular, in ways that add value to end-users, publishers or advertisers, three specific groups we seem to care about at betaworks. We seem to be attracted to those examples, but in any event this can get pretty heady and theoretical and wonky.

And then sometimes the theoretical turns specific in a way that validates all the lunchtime chattering. A few months ago Summize turned their search application toward Twitter - in a way Twitter is the very definition of a mass of data -- conversational, casual, and totally unstructured. By adding search to that mass of data - and including including things such as trending analysis and other ways to search - by user, geography, sentiment, places and dates, for example, the unwashed mass of Twitter info becomes . . . structured data. Today I found out about Plurk and that Firefox RC3 was released, to name just two minor and immaterial examples from the trending topics.

So maybe this is an example of where adding structure creates new ways of even thinking about a data set. Or, much more broadly, where adding structure can take an application and make it into a platform.