VerySpatial » Social Networking

NASA and Gowalla team up for a nationwide scavenger hunt

Sue — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 05:15:12 +0000

For all of you out there who use Gowalla as your mobile location-based social sharing app, you’ll want to check out the new partnership between NASA and Gowalla that includes a fun virtual scavenger hunt called “Search for Moon Rocks.” Any time you visit a museum, science center, or planetarium that has a real moon rock on display, you can check in and get a virtual moon rock for your Gowalla account. Since NASA astronauts successfully brought lunar samples back to Earth during the Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 missions, there are plenty of places where you can find them. To help you out, NASA has posted a fun map visualization of the places where you can find lunar samples on display.

The NASA-Gowalla partnership also allows users to collect 3 other virtual items – a NASA patch, a spacesuit, and a space shuttle – when they check in at NASA visitor centers and other museums and facilities that are part of the NASA Museum Alliance. And, as if that weren’t exciting enough, the 100 Gowalla users to collect 3 out of the 4 NASA patches will receive a copy of the Search for the Moon Rocks map in the mail!

Via GeekSugar

Urbagrams – Mapping the social city

Sue — Fri, 10 Sep 2010 17:52:28 +0000

In order to investigate the idea of a social archipelago, the notion that our cities are “fragmented islands of social activity separated by large areas dedicated to commercial workplaces, flows of vehicles, residential sprawl or industrial sites.” Anil Bawa Cavia analyzed more than a million Foursquare check-ins in a number of cities and mapped those data as points to create a series of social activity density maps, which he calls urbagrams. By looking at the resulting maps for cities such as New York, Paris, and London, we can get a picture of the spatial distribution of social activity through Foursquare, and see where social activity is clustered and how the patterns differ from city to city.

Via Gizmodo

Scott Kurtz can predict the future! And there’s Starbucks discounts

Frank — Mon, 24 May 2010 13:31:41 +0000

If you read pvponline.com (a great webcomic, by the way), you’ll recall a story line where a character uses a fictional Foursquare like service to become the mayor of a coffee shop. In the comic, this entitles him to discounts on coffee. In a strange twist of life imitating art, Starbucks is now providing discounts to actual Foursquare mayors of various Starbucks across the land. This is a pretty cool blending of the virtual space with the actual space and starts to highlight a lot of the promise of Location Based Services. It turns it all into a sort of ‘meta game’ and I, for one, find it utterly fascinating (not least of all because I find PVP hilarious!) I think you’ll begin to see more and more of these sorts of blurring between the real world and the virtual world.

Victorian 3-D

Barb — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:04:05 +0000

Before there was Avatar and even before Fisher-Price Viewmaster, there was stereoscopy or stereo photographs that presented scenes in life-like three dimensions similar to a Viewmaster. A recent book on one set of Stereoscopic photos of 1850′s village life titled “A Village Lost and Found”. It is a picture book that evokes the Victorian times of a specific village through a series of 3-D images meticously gathered over a lifetime of research. But one of the most fascinating aspects of the work is its relevance to geospatial and social networking technologies today. The authors, Brian May and spent years searching to determine if the village was a composite of multiple villages or a specific location, but it wasn’t until 2003 that they asked for help through the Interent community and someone responded with a, “Well, I live there” that it was solved. How many other geographical mysteries big and small have been solved or are waiting to be solved by the world’s increased connectivity?

MySynths – Photosynth meets Facebook

Sue — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 21:31:03 +0000

As many of you know, I just love Photosynth, so naturally I had to post when I was catching up on tech news this afternoon and read about MySynths, a new Facebook application that lets you upload synths created in Photosynth to your Facebook Profile and display them on your Wall. Developed by speakTech, MySynths is a cloud application that uses Windows Azure cloud services operating system.

Of course I had to try MySynths out, so if you’re on Facebook, you can check out one of my synths uploaded via MySynths here

Via CNET

Local Emergency Management gets on the Twitter bandwagon

Sue — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:28:27 +0000

I was checking out my local news online just a few minutes ago, and a story popped up that our county (Monongalia County, WV) Office of Emergency Management has started up a Twitter feed. I of course immediately logged in to Twitter and am now of 12 Followers. The OEM hopes to use Twitter to notify people about public emergencies, weather alerts, etc. and they’ve already got a post warning about stormy weather this week.

I, for one, am actually more than a little surprised and impressed that at least some of our local officials are embracing social networking, but I’ll be curious to see if they really utilize it (and to see how many more people actually follow their Twitter feed once the word has a chance to spread)

What about you guys out there? Does your local government utilize social networking tools, location-based or otherwise, to help get information out to the public?