MobBlog

salvo told me that  foursquare had one of

its databases overloaded with check-ins and consequently experienced a downtime of 11 hours! so central services are unscalable (unreliable) and they need to be decentralized. partial decentralization is the solution in the industry, and full decentralization still remains in the academic circles ($$ reasons). few years ago, i asked the question: what if mobile social-networking services were to be decentralized. it was an academic exercise that resulted in:

• Problem statement: Tapping the Mobile Digital Tapestry: Can mobile 2.0 companies make money without being greedy for personal data?
• Preliminary solutions: Selecting trustworthy content using tags (from Sect 2.3 onwards)

meeting at nesta about how serious tasks are being made more game-like. example of serious games: Tate Trumps , Re-mission (helps teenagers with cancer), SuperMe (teaches how to cope with obstacles in life),  Quest to Learn (the school in New York organised around game principles), The Good Gym (connected people who want to get fit with

older people who need visitors. More on the meeting (write-up). More on serious games ( ‘Games Lessons’ from The Economist).

…Is it time to forget ‘nearby events’ and look at neighbourhoods?

Location-based services that emphasise recommending nearby events are doomed to failure. Here is why (more on this paper). We have recently studied the relationship between preferences for social events and geography in the large metropolitan area of Greater Boston. We sampled location estimations of one million mobile phone users in the area, combined the sample with social events in the same area, and inferred the social events attended by 2,519 residents. Upon this data, we tested six simple algorithms for recommending social events and found a couple of extremely interesting things:

• The most effective algorithm recommends events that are popular among residents of an area.
• The least effective, instead, recommends events that are geographically close to the area.

Conclusion: When we build and deploy new technologies in our cities, we should go back to what Jane Jacobs taught us about neighbourhoods.

Companies that fail to do that are doomed to failure. For more, here is the paper, which I’ll present at ICDM.

Call to action: We would be very happy to collaborate with mobile social-networking companies. My email: daniele.quercia@cl.cam.ac.uk

Presentation:

following this post, notes for day 2. featured:  luis von ahn, jonathan zittrain, nourish contractor, and manuel castells.

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