StickySquares

Name:

StickySquares

One-liner:

View a map with the stickiest places, the most popular with highest loyalty— clusters, patterns, indicate neighborhoods with sticky social action.

Product Vision:

This product is for trend spotters of all kinds: realty, developers, small businesses, urban planners, event manager, renters... who need to find areas that are socially attractive to rent, buy, develop, or just want to know what's hot or what has up & coming potential... this app provides improved choices about investment in time and money by focusing on places that have great social activity. Finding, supporting, and encouraging places to create many focal points nearby ("The Power of 10") is one way to make thriving local economies in local communities.

Authors:

Jeff To (IA), Nir Pengas (Dev), Daniel Latorre (Product), Volkan Unsal (Dev) Simon Cavalletto (Dev, prototyping)

Frenzied hackathon action shots.

About the hack

Grab an area, get all the venues, for each get the checkinsCount (total checkins ever here) and usersCount (total users who have ever checked in here) to derive simple measure of stickiness and popularity. Display this on a Google map, with a list of venues.

What tools did you use?

Ruby, Google Maps (Volkan to supply more deets)

Hackathon Demo

Presented at the hackathon off localserver on machine, online link to come...

Product Concept Links

Idea behind "Power of 10": http://www.pps.org/articles/poweroften/

"Power of 10" concept: http://www.placemakingchicago.com/about/power.asp

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Feb. 20 Update

Perl based rapid prototype w/ results by category, sized pin drop icons, and heat map inidcator by Simon Cavalletto:

Screenshot

The process I used was to pick a lat-long center point and a venue category, then pass those as arguments to the venue search service.

(The categories are returned by the 'venues/categories' API endpoint, and I pass the name of the category as the 'query' parameter to the 'venues/search' endpoint along with the ll value.)

In case it's of any use, you can compare the results I'm getting by clicking the below link, then working through the interface by pressing the "Find Recent" and "Show List" buttons to choose locations and categories to search on.

http://hackathon.cavalletto.org/?gentoken=1

I also fixed the error in the heatmap API proxy, and included a few links so you can see sample search results without having to log in the first time:

Cupcakes example: http://hackathon.cavalletto.org/?region=40.756847459589%2C-73.9870834350586+W+42nd+St%2C+NYC&category=4bf58dd8d48988d1bc941735+Cupcakes

The category matching isn't perfect, but it does typically give me 50 - 60 decent results for most of the popular categories I've tested so far.