Mobile Behavior: an Omnicom Group Company

BumpRADAR is a recently released iPhone app that helps users visualize location based activity around them. It is created by mopimp productions and uses a mashup of data from Bump, Foursquare, and SimpleGeo.

Discover which events, parties, & venues are bumpin' by leveraging RADAR - Realtime Activity Discovery via Augmented Reality. By visualizing nearby Bump activity you will gain relevant social context about what's going on around you!

Only interactions within the past hour are displayed and it is entirely anonymous. Viewing a map of Austin during SXSW, it is not surprising to see pins clustering around the convention center. It is a fairly accurate representation of early adopter activity during the conference.

While BumpRADAR is unique in execution, it is not the first of its kind. Citysense presents mobile users with a heatmap of a city's hotspots in real-time. Vicarious.ly is a mashup built specifically to track the "location wars" during SXSW. It maps mobile interactions via BlockChalk, Brightkite, Bump, Flickr, Foursquare, Gowalla, and Twitter. Twitter also recently activated location support and to promote it employees can be tracked via map at sxsw.twitter.com. For Pepsi's Podcast Lounge, Zeitgeist displays were set up that present real-time Foursquare check-in data. Venues can be considered hot according to number of check-ins and tweets in a specific location.

All of these apps raise awareness of our immediate surroundings, presenting what is popular and where people are interacting. It takes previously invisible social behavior and makes it visible through digital technology. While this is still only applicable to those actively participating through services like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Bump, it provides those that do a very new ability.

Ambient awareness was a term brought to us with public microblogging services like Twitter. With location updates we now have ambient awareness around the physical proximity of our social network. Those using location based services can now observe as people migrate from panel to panel to dinner to party while decisions on where to go next can be based on both an event's popularity and friends' presence. This could have its benefits, but like any other socio-technological development it could have its cons. As location awareness is still relatively new, its effects on our behavior are still being defined.