see a puffin eat a fish

A while back I was working on developing a mobile component for Jonathan Harris’ influential We Feel Fine service, which mines the web for blog entries with specific words that could be correlated to feelings. Love, hate, wish, etc. I was going to couple We Feel Fine data with location information so that, using your mobile device, you could see in real time how a particular location ‘feels’. That project was on shaky conceptual ground as it wasn’t clear whether I was authentically providing the feel of a location. Possibly I was just presenting how a specific blogger feels who happens to be blogging from that location.

I found Twistori today, which is yet another iteration of the We Feel Fine idea. Twistori pulls content from the hugely popular Twitter service via the Summize API, keying in off the same types of words as We Feel Fine. Love, Hate, etc. It has a much more ‘real time’ feel than We Feel Fine, as the question Twitter users are answering is ‘what are you doing right now?’ As Twitter is interfaced with location data via services such as FireEagle, Twistori could get localized so that users could potentially see feelings in their neighborhood.

One day these types of services will be ’something’. That is less gimmicky, not something you just show your friends or blog about, but instead a service you use to inform your decisions.

CrowdScapes, my thesis at ITP, got a nice writeup in the Yahoo! Research Berkeley blog. Thanks Mor!

Thesis wrapped up yesterday, next week is the show and graduation. But right now I am in NJ, at a bar mitzvah. All very bittersweet. My presentation was last night and went really well. I was nervous for the first minute or so but then really got into a decent groove. Tomorrow I do it all over again at the Mobilized conference.

ITP and some class of 07 students were recently mentioned in the times. Click on this picture of Andrew to read the details.

I present today!  Wish me luck.

I came up with this handy chart to position my thesis (click on it to make it bigger). It sums up my earlier posting regarding static content and the critical mass of users required to get an application off the ground. I’ve also added, on Josh Klein suggestion, in-car GPS displays in my upper right hand corner of my chart. Everyone has them, but restaurant recommendations from social media sites don’t really propagate to their content databases. That most likely involves buying your way into the database.

Let me know of other location based services that belong on this chart!