Word: maps
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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Launched in March, Foursquare turns city maps into game boards. Members use text messages or applications for iPhones or Android phones to post when they are at a location like a bar or a restaurant. As incentive to share, your current location shows up on the Foursquare map to help you meet up with friends. Check in enough times from a coffee shop, for example, and you're dubbed its mayor. Give a shout-out from your gym 10 times in a month, and you might get a badge that dubs you a "Gym Rat." That gaming component...
...founder Dennis Crowley says Foursquare counts on users' becoming protective of their little territories. Foursquare is birthed from Crowley's previous effort, a now defunct site called Dodgeball that was bought by Google in 2005 but stuggled to expand beyond a few thousand users. Dodgeball had the map part but lacked the game, and when Crowley left Google in 2007, he tried to figure out how to make his next effort more fun. "Once we started resurrecting Dodgeball, we thought adding game mechanics might make it something really interesting," Crowley says. "And it really took off and became sticky with...
Want to know what has your roommate glued to the DVD player on his laptop? The New York Times compiled a list of the most rented Netflix movies per neighborhood and created this nifty color-coded map. So if your roomie's taste matches that of most 02138 residents, he's probably watching one of the following...
Still, the map raises some interesting (if not really important) questions. Why, for instance, was there a complete absence of sci-fi flicks in the top 10 for 02139 (where our MIT neighbors live)? Are you surprised that, in the Boston area, "Mad Men" was rented more in Harvard Square than anywhere else? Or that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was the most rented film in all of America? Just some J-Term food for thought...
...best the USGS and other organizations can do is use the global web of seismometers and other instruments that are already in place and always being improved to build the best map possible of the planet's interior and at least narrow the predictive window of when quakes are likely to happen. They can also use these data to anticipate how severe the next tremor, whenever it comes, is likely to be. This can help drive policy decisions like improving building codes, reinforcing infrastructure and zoning some areas as unsuitable for development. That's hardly the same as precise predicting...