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
There are approximately 273,637 people following Happn.in in 110 cities around the world.
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.
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
People
Jay Boice
Jay has been writing code and working with large datasets for many years. A nice day, in true Happn.in fashion, might look like: 'grassy knoll', 'spicy food', 'open source', 'mountain goats', 'graph theory'. He is a founder of Pomelo, a software consulting firm based in Massachusetts.
Matthew Latkiewicz
Matthew designed his first website in 2004 for a café he owned at the time. He has since sold the café, but has continued designing and developing for the web with a strong commitment to usability and web standards. He's worked for many big name clients including Hearst Magazines, Rodale Press, and vh1; done front-end development for a number of web applications. He also writes about wine for McSweeney's and for his own blog You Will Not Believe.
