Deep Currents

There’s a new service called CitySense out for the BlackBerry that takes advantage of a very interesting dataset: the exact paths of thousands of GPS-tracked cabs. (Don’t worry, Mac cultists, it’ll be out for the iPhone soon.) The much-heralded age of pervasive sensing and ubiquitous computing is finally arriving, in bits and pieces, and (like many potential uses of such data) this application gives us a fascinating new window on our own behavior while falling just shy of violating privacy. (Hat tip goes to O’Reilly Radar and Global Guerrillas for noticing the news, and I’d recommend Adam Greenfield’s Everyware for the big picture.) This one is a juxtaposition of past tracks and the present moment, first showing you where in the city there is typically a lot of activity at the present day and time, then comparing that with data from what’s happening right now to show you what places have an above-average number of people. Say you’re about to go out for a night on the town but you’re wondering whether North Beach or Soma is more of a hotspot at the moment. You pull out CitySense, note that Soma is 35% above par to North Beach’s 10%, and decide to join the mob. The really interesting part comes when they deliver the next promised feature: data about where people “like you” have gathered in the past and are gathering right now, presumably segmented by personally-chosen options such as age, gender, income, ethnicity, religion, or perhaps a lighter-weight set of factors such as taste in music or favorite fashion labels. The next step beyond that would naturally be social network connections: where is my Facebook network, and where are their friends?

Written: June 17th, 2008