TY - GEN
T1 - Whoo.ly
T2 - 31st Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems: Changing Perspectives, CHI 2013
AU - Hu, Yuheng
AU - Farnham, Shelly D.
AU - Monroy-Hernández, Andrés
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - Social media systems promise powerful opportunities for people to connect to timely, relevant information at the hy-per local level. Yet, finding the meaningful signal in noisy social media streams can be quite daunting to users. In this paper, we present and evaluate Whoo.ly, a web service that provides neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whoo.ly automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We provide an overview of our design goals with Whoo.ly and describe the system including the user interface and our unique event detection and summarization algorithms. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a comprehensive user study. The outcome demonstrated that most participants found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighbor-hoods.
AB - Social media systems promise powerful opportunities for people to connect to timely, relevant information at the hy-per local level. Yet, finding the meaningful signal in noisy social media streams can be quite daunting to users. In this paper, we present and evaluate Whoo.ly, a web service that provides neighborhood-specific information based on Twitter posts that were automatically inferred to be hyperlocal. Whoo.ly automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information about events, topics, people, and places from these Twitter posts. We provide an overview of our design goals with Whoo.ly and describe the system including the user interface and our unique event detection and summarization algorithms. We tested the usefulness of the system as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a comprehensive user study. The outcome demonstrated that most participants found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighbor-hoods.
KW - Civic engagement
KW - Event detection
KW - Hyperlocal community
KW - Location-based social networks
KW - Social media
KW - Twitter
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84877953566&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84877953566&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/2470654.2466478
DO - 10.1145/2470654.2466478
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84877953566
SN - 9781450318990
T3 - Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings
SP - 3481
EP - 3490
BT - CHI 2013
Y2 - 27 April 2013 through 2 May 2013
ER -