What is Happn.in?

Happn.in gives Twitter a local focus. For each Happn.in city, there is:

• A current list of Local Twitter Trends
• A Local Twitter Feed, in which locals can send and receive information to each other.
• A Local Town Crier, a person trusted by the community to tweet interesting, relevant information once a day.

There are approximately 278,924 people following Happn.in in 110 cities around the world.

There is also a general Twitter user, @happn_in, from which updates on the project will be sent.

Any questions or feedback can be directed to jay@happn.in.

Background

Happn.in began in early 2009 in response to the rapid growth of Twitter. We saw that Twitter was becoming a valuable source of information, but the interesting content was getting buried. We started Happn.in to pull some of this useful information out of the noise, specifically, the answer to the question 'What's going on near me?'

Happn.in was built with the long-term idea that localized communities can benefit from Twitter if they can find and talk to each other. We will continue to update the site with features that aid this goal.

Future plans

Although the site currently groups hot phrases by location, it may be extended to aggregate by other attributes. For example, it could generate lists of popular phrases within networks of users, groups of friends or people with common interests.

Data visualizations are also in the works.

Datasets

Datasets are available to researchers. If you are interested, please contact us with a quick description of your work.

Software

The site and associated crawler/aggregator were written with:

• ruby
• sinatra
• sequel
• mysql
• apache
• passenger
• ubuntu