I’ve always been a huge fan of mapping neighborhoods and perceived neighborhood boundaries. These often subjective, invisible boundaries are very useful in many applications and in my mind a huge, untapped opportunity (ping me if you want to go into business!). This article from Fast Company looks at mapping and analyzing boundaries created from foursquare data called Livehoods (http://livehoods.org/) – the research effort by some keen Carnegie Mellon U mobile lab students (http://mcom.cs.cmu.edu/) analyzed 18 million Foursquare check-ins to spot algorithmic relationships between the spots people frequent. According to the work… “Livehoods looks at the geographic distance between venues, but also a form of `social distance’ that measures the degree of overlap in the people that check-in to them”.
[Read more…] about Livehoods – Neighborhood Boundaries Generated using foursquare Social Media Data