Hello. Week two of my thesis journal.

I mostly researched on some projects with similar ideas. It was fun to see what’s already out there and help think of more ideas and also to remember old ideas/inspirations!

I already talked about Snap Map last week.

But what else is out there? Here are some cool projects/products I found or already have been inspired by:

1.  Snap Trends

“Our goal is to make the process of discovering relevant social media easy, so you can spend more time acting and less time searching. With our intuitive user interface and world-wide or geo-specific searches, you can easily and quickly discover social insights around the places and people that matter to you.”

This is a product they are trying to sell to help with social media insights but their main goal and some of their features are similar to what I’m interested in creating.

A platform that makes discovering info on social media through geo-specific searches easier and allows you to monitor events and conversations as they happen instead of stumbling upon them in your newsfeed. It allows you to be more intentional and where and who you are communicating with or discovering.

2. Dataminr

Dataminr is actually a product that we use at work to help discover breaking news. It uses social media to track posts about the news that are going viral. On the site, users are able to search what is happening in different locations and see what’s trending.

I get multiple alerts throughout the day on updates for breaking news. Sometimes we use Dataminr to inform us about breaking news and then we are able to go to that tweet that is gaining traction and reach out to that person.

Dataminr markets itself as a “real-time event and risk detection platform.”

“Dataminr’s real-time AI platform detects the earliest signals of high-impact events and emerging risks from within publicly available data.”

This is pretty awesome because it definitely allows you to discover what’s going on in communities around the world live!

3. John Meyer’s Fresco News

I read about John Meyer’s Fresco News project a few years back in a Forbes 30 under 30 articles.

The main goal of this project was to empower “regular people to be reporters in hopes of making world events more transparent.”

At the time he was able to make a deal with Fox News to provide photo and video footage from citizens to over 70 news organizations.

This is interesting because it reminds me of the work that I do on the social discovery team where we look for breaking news on social media and get permission to use it for our news network.

I need to look into it more but something that’s possibly equivalent to this today is Storyful a company that licenses viral videos and sells them to news companies.

Anyway, this is related to my project because it’s the whole idea that we can be informed from social from people who are on the ground. They can tell us more about our communities and it can be powerful. Not only is it a place to connect but it’s a place to learn about the world.

If I’m visiting a new city I could go to social and see what people are doing that day etc.

There are probably a lot more interesting projects this is just the surface.

Cornell Box

Okay this box is bare but I just moved and my items are scattered between my new apartment and storage. I would have liked to add more and more personal items to make it more detailed but this is what I have at the moment.

I added souvenirs/photos from traveling plus my phone. I think a cool way to think of the project is that it’s a way to be informed/connect with the world through technology.

So that’s what this box represents either:

1. through my project/technology I want people to be able to achieve the experiences/connections/knowledge about new places and people that I had visiting new places with friends

2. Through my project/technology, people can share the experiences that they’ve had with others in the hopes that they can connect and have those experiences too!