Earlier this month, a rich subset of social media users and technology evangelists descended upon Austin, Texas for the annual SxSW interactive conference. Some see SxSW (South by SouthWest) as an early indicator of developing technology trends. Twitter, the popular microblogging service, broke out as a popular consumer application at the conference two years ago.
This year, the dominant trend seems to be locational services. The video embedded below was produced by a company called SimpleGeo: it uses a data visualization tool to demonstrate how attendees, performers and regular old Austinites were using various consumer locational services during the conference.
Obviously, there are many people who find these services useful, either to meet up with friends, create the opportunity to meet new friends, or simply brag about getting into the most exclusive parties and shows.
As an Office, we are interested in how information from these locational services might be integrated into larger efforts to collect and aggregate data about consumers’ behaviour and preferences.
We also like really cool data visualizations.