An application called MoboQ does exactly this by linking social networks with location data to let users ask time-sensitive questions about specific locations, and get them answered by complete strangers on the spot. This is crowd-sensing: a way of tapping into networks of distributed human beings.
But there's a catch. This hip social-media app is not the offspring of Silicon Valley, but the product of a Shanghai technology incubator called Diggerlab. It is only available in China with Sina Weibo, a Twitter-equivalent which boasts 400 million members. MoboQ lets its users ask questions about specific places in the physical world and then finds up to 15 Sina Weibo users best positioned to answer, based on their recent activity on Weibo and Jiepang, China's equivalent of location-based service Foursquare. You need to be signed up to MoboQ to ask a question, but anyone on Weibo can answer it.
Western firms are racing to come up with similar products. In an experiment run on Twitter last year, Jeff Nichols and colleagues at IBM's Almaden lab in San Jose, California, polled people on Twitter whose Foursquare accounts identified them as being at airports across the US. The team sent unsolicited tweets to ask how long it took them to clear airport security. The team mapped the data they gathered from the project, giving them a detailed overview of how quickly people were being cleared.
New Scientist (sub required)
Comments