initial post

post via michael shyu

http://www.sensenetworks.com/technology.php

a really interesting company based off an offshoot of MIT's Media Lab along with the Human Dynamics Research Center. It uses San Fran as thier test bed for its application "city sense" My guess due to Googles free wiFi network there.

"Citysense eliminates the need to search
Instead, it evolves searching to sensing. Citysense passively "senses" the most popular places based on actual real-time activity and displays a live heat map. The application intelligently leverages the inherent wisdom of crowds without any change in existing user behavior, in order to navigate people to the hottest spots in a city. And it's not dependent on having a critical mass of users on the system.

Citysense is an application that learns
The application learns about where each user likes to spend time – and it processes the movements of other users with similar patterns. In its next release, Citysense will not only answer "where is everyone right now" but "where is everyone like me right now." Four friends at dinner discussing where to go next will see four different live maps of hotspots and unexpected activity. Even if they're having dinner in a city they've never visited before. "

While I think this is interesting I think that the macrosense has a lot of potential in it in that it tracks human trends over time and categorizes people into tribes with certain interests. I think the architectural parallels have a lot of potential in that social movements and program interests are directly what the apps deal with and at the same time it is also exactly what architecture does. in that in a lot of ways we program spaces that impact social movement.

....sorry for the wall of text.