43things Vision + GeoSearch

My research group focuses on studying and analyzing the goals that users have on their web (also see my previous post on constructing goal graphs from 43things.com). To motivate some aspects of this topic in an upcoming talk, I have experimented with Yahoo Pipes. My intention was to visualize (some of) the goals users have on the web in an interactive and engaging way. Plus, I wanted to learn about Yahoo Pipes, which appears to be a powerful tool to quickly mash up information from different feeds/APIs.

The outcome of this endeavor are two modest mash-up attempts using Yahoo Pipes, and the 43things.com API and RSS feeds.

Screenshot of the 43things Geo-Search mash-up (Yahoo Pipes)

43things Vision shows a configurable number of goals that were recently added to 43things.com (using this RSS feed) – and puts them on a map. Because goals can only be related to a particular location via users, and newly added goals typically have few users, a major problem of this mashup is that a certain share of goals can not be mapped (that means a certain share of goals can not be related to a user who provides geo-information). This is where 43things GeoSearch comes in.

43things GeoSearch allows to query all goals on 43things.com, and ranks the result list according to goal popularity (number of users who share this goal). This produces much nicer results.

Enjoy!

(I might post a link to the talk where I used this demonstration at a later point.) The slides are available here.