Citysense is a new service that takes a mass approach to location-based services (LBS). Just as Twitter poses the question “What are you doing?,” Citysense asks, “What is everybody in my city doing right now?”.
Based on users’ inputs, the service can show you how active locations in their area are at the moment. If certain areas are well as which ones are abnormally active, they’ll be displayed in red on a sharp infrared-style map (right)–perfect for the agoraphobic, or traffiphobic. To this end, the developers have included an alarm that will wake you up earlier if the city is busier than normal before your commute.
This type of movement tracking recalls a recent study that used location-tracking data from 100,000 cellphones in Europe to monitor human movement. The study suggested that most people can be found in one of just a few locations at any time, and that they do not generally go far from home. While some had concerns about the privacy implications, it was a step towards answering the question of how to measure something as ephemeral as movement. Data like this could be used to create computer models for understanding emergency response, urban planning and the spread of disease.
The developers of Citysense have also made anthropological use of their data. According to O’Reilly Radar, the Chief Scientist is modeling the flow of data and has delineated seven “tribes” of people.
Each group is represented by a color and each one has it’s own type of destination (for example Greens are more likely to end up in the hospital after a night out). Very interestingly those destination-types translate across multiple cities — suddenly it becomes a lot easier to figure out where to go when you are in a new city. You can watch two Processing visualizations that shows the tribes moving around SF (one, two).
This last point is what Citysense will be moving towards in the future. That is, it will answer the question: “Where’s everybody like me?” In this case, it sounds like Dodgeball or Loopt, but for people you don’t know. Will that be an attractive proposition? Will people want to meet up with random, yet like-minded users? Online, sure, but offline is a different ballgame, right? One would think, but online connections are increasingly facilitating offline meetups. Just look at the “team buying,” or tuangou, phenomenon. Chinese shoppers began discussing prices online in chat rooms and forums, then meeting up at a store, flash mob-style, to bargain a discount on the spot. Now dozens of team-buying websites have sprung up to catch the trend. But one need not look further than online dating to see the potential of profile-matched meet-ups. Mobile dating services like ipling and BEDD are springing up based on the concept of mobile matchmaking.
Still in beta, Citysense is launching in San Francisco and then Chicago for starters. It’s an opt-in service–if you sign up you allow them to locate you–so its success depends on widespread adoption. Indeed, it can never truly answer the question of where everybody is–maybe just your next date.
