According to the Washington Post, the impending initial public offering (IPO) by Facebook, with its expected windfall of cash from investors, might encourage some employees to go looking for housing. But the prospective home buyers are a bit picky. You see, they might not want to live next to someone who works for Google, for example, or any other competitor for that matter.
“You get a Yahoo guy against a Facebook guy against a Zynga guy against an Apple guy against a Google guy, then it's not just about the house,” real estate agent Carol Rodoni told the paper. “It's about the egos.”
So, how might you go looking for a house that wasn't near a competitor. Well, without violating privacy laws, might you start by see how your friends (...and their friends) are using location-based social media? If people are checking in with Google+ might they be a Google employee versus someone who is a checking in with Facebook Places? If they check in with foursquare does that mean they lean one way or another? What about Tweets with location enabled? Could you mine Tweets that indicate that a neighborhood favors Apple products and thus indicates an enclave of Apple employees, that is, given a proximal location to Cupertino, for example.
Seems like a great opportunity to map neighborhoods by social media preferences. Although mining that kind of "big data" could mean you might need a database appliance. Or maybe someone will come up with a simple solution that we might find in the app store soon? But which app store?
Think about it.
by Joe Francica on 02/01 at 11:15 AM |
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Google announced a Public Alerts page on Jan 25. The idea is to keep you informed of emergency alerts for floods, tornadoes, winter storms, and other dangers that may be headed your way. But, it's completely query driven, not location-based in this first attempt. Google is seeking feedback. Mano Marks noted on Twitter he'd worked on this project in the past.
- Google Blog
MapQuest launched an HTML5 client.
- press release
Adam Sadilek of the University of Rochester has developed a tool to predict one's location based on friend's locations known through Twitter. How well? It can locate you to within 100 meters with up to 85% accuracy.
"You can actually infer a lot of things about people, even though they are pretty careful about how they manage their online behaviour," he reports.
- New Scientist
by Adena Schutzberg on 01/26 at 05:30 AM |
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New Zealand Defense Force has handheld imagery (KMZ) and aerial photography (PDF) available.
-- update 2/22/11 --
OpenStreetMap has free map resources for Christchurch including shapefiles and garmin downloads: http://bit.ly/ChristchurchQuakeOSM
via @hotosm
--- update 1:00 pm ---
Update: Esri Distributor's http://s1.demos.eaglegis.co.nz/JavaScript/earthquake-christchurch/">Social Media Map branded with Environment Canterbury Regional Council and Bing.
- via GISUser and @: "Earthquake Incident Viewer. Operational info as being updated. Also incl Ushahidi feeds "
Here's Esri's official discussion of the map and a note that more data layers will be added over time. Also form to request help and a list of resources for responders and people affected.
via @jiriteach
And you can build a map just like it with a template from Esri. Apparently Esri NZ "lifted" it for use.
- ArcGIS Online blog
--- origina post 9 am EST ---
[Google's] Person Finder allows people in Christchurch to upload or request information about individuals. At time of writing the new website had records on around 4,600 people.
- Telegraph UK
RWW has a nice round up of resources.
- RWW
by Adena Schutzberg on 02/26 at 06:46 AM |
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