Location: Boringness and Predictability Help Map Human Mobility
Stamen employee and geo-geek Aaron Cope has been experimenting with Foursquare check-in data, plugging it into piratemaps. The results, seen above, visualize his individual behavior and social network's stomping ground. It looks like a more detailed version of another Foursquare app, Where Do You Go.
The image on the left is labeled, 'mostly I just go to the studio.' What is interesting about this, is it closely ties to a new paper released in the February issue of Science where researchers used data from 50,000 anonymous cell phone users to study human mobility. Their discovery: "The surprise was that we couldn't find unpredictable people," Barabási says. "We are all boring."
This boringness is what location based social networks are banking on. Brightkite can visualize this kind of information based on user activity. Predictability is what will fuel Google's intuitive search and eventually, ad targeting. In a 2008 New York Times article, Sense Networks chief scientist Tony Jebara said this about location data, "we can predict tourism, we can tell you how confident consumers are, we can tell retailers about, say, their competitors, who’s coming in from particular neighborhoods.”
What it all comes down to is the activating of data exhaust, and then the more difficult step, analyzing it. Aaron Cope's visualization of his social network's location behavior is an interesting use of this available data.
