Week 2 Winner of Happn.in iPod Touch Giveaway

Posted by Matthew Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:27:15 GMT

@bigacesurfer from from Charleston, SC wins the second iPod Touch! Yes! All of the city finalists (those with the most votes in each of their cities) are listed below.

As previously announced, Happn.in will be giving away Four iPod Touches to the people who get the most votes in their city’s Happn.in Feed. We’ve given away two so far.

NOW: we’re changing the schedule a little bit from what we previously announced. In order to coincide with the release of the Happn.in iPhone app in a couple weeks, we are putting the remaining two iPod Touch contests on hold. We will announce here and via our Twitter Account when the contest is back on. Check out the rules

The iPhone app will not just be another Twitter client – it will provide a dedicated way to communicate to your city using Twitter.

We had 66 finalists from all the cities last week. All of them received the most votes in their city’s Happn.in feed. This means they gave their city the most valuable city-specific content.

NOW: The idea of the Happn.in feed is not actually to give away iPods. The point is to give a local focus to Twitter. We hope that makes sense to you and that you find the Feeds useful. We welcome your feedback.

Week 2 Finalists

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Week 1 Winner of Happn.in iPod Touch Giveaway

Posted by Matthew Sun, 04 Oct 2009 20:59:47 GMT

@Ms_CL from Ottawa, Ontario Canada wins the first iPod Touch! Yes!

As previously announced, each week for the next four weeks three weeks, Happn.in will be giving away an iPod Touch to the person who gets the most votes in their city’s Happn.in Feed.

You Should Totally Enter : Read the Rules

We had 89 finalists from all the cities last week. All of them received the most votes in their city’s Happn.in feed. This means they gave their city the most valuable city-specific content.

NOW: The idea of the Happn.in feed is not actually to give away iPods. The point is to give a local focus to Twitter. We hope that makes sense to you and that you find the Feeds useful. We welcome your feedback.

Next Winner Announced next weekend!

Week 1 Finalists

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iPod Touch Giveaway II - Now with Four iPod Touches

Posted by Matthew Thu, 24 Sep 2009 02:43:00 GMT

We just launched a new feature called the Happn.in Feed. Try out that feature and you could win one of four iPod Touches1

ipod_touch.jpg

Update (10/11/09): We’re changing the schedule a little bit from what we previously announced. In order to coincide with the release of the Happn.in iPhone app in a couple weeks, we are putting the remaining two iPod Touch contests on hold. We will announce here and via our Twitter Account when the contest is back on.

Each week for the next four weeks, we will be giving away an iPod Touch to the person who gets the most votes in their city’s Happn.in Feed.

The Happn.in Feed?

The Happn.in Feed gives you the ability to Tweet directly to your city. Similarly, it gives you access to city-focused tweets. Have a show coming up? Have a restaurant review? Want to just talk about the weather? The Happn.in feed focuses your Tweets on your community.

How to use the Happn.in Feed to win an iPod Touch.

  1. Go to your city’s Happn.in page (find your city on the homepage)
  2. Use the text box to talk to your city
  3. You will be authorized through your Twitter account
  4. Your Tweet will appear on the Happn.in Feed
  5. Get your Tweets Voted Up.

Each tweet in the Happn.in feed can be voted either up or down.

We keep score; and the person with the most votes at the end of the week from each city gets a chance at the iPod. We put all the city winners’ names into a hat and pull one out at random. Got it? You can tweet in your city’s Happn.in Feed as much as you like; but remember – if you are annoying, there is a bigger likelihood you will be voted down.

The contest starts now. We choose the first winner Friday, Oct. 2 and then every Friday for the next three weeks (Oct. 9, 16, 23).

Contest Rules

1NOTE: The prize is actually an apple gift card in the amount of $199 – the price of an 8GB iPod Touch. Because we thought: maybe you don’t want an iPod touch – maybe you want $199 worth of some other Apple product? You know?

  1. Contest runs from Sept. 24 through through Oct. 23 see Update Up Above for New Schedule
  2. You enter by posting a tweet into your city’s Happn.in Feed.
  3. You may post in your city’s Happn.in Feed as often as you like.
  4. At the end of each week of the contest, the person who’s tweets in the Feed have collected the most positive votes from each city gets entered into a raffle for the Apple Gift Card. There are 110 cities.
  5. A winner will be chosen at random from the 110 finalists for four consecutive Fridays starting Oct. 2 at 8 PM Eastern; and will be announced via the official Happn.in Twitter User (@happn_in), as well as on the Happn.in homepage.
  6. The winner must provide us with a legit mailing address within 7 days of the announcement. We will attempt to contact the winner through Twitter Direct Message (though, that person must follow @happn_in for us to be able to do that). The Apple Gift Card will be sent out within 7 days after receiving the mailing address.
  7. We reserve the right to change or update these rules as necessary.

OK SO: Good luck. Any questions, definitely let us know either through Twitter or our Feedback Page. We will update this blog post with any Frequently Asked Questions or Rule Updates as the contest continues.

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14 New Cities on Happn.in

Posted by Matthew Thu, 10 Sep 2009 15:26:42 GMT

Happn.in added 14 cities over the past week to the ranks. Now lovers of the following cities can receive & express their love in 140 character bursts:

Like all Happn.in cities, the above will display the top local Twitter trends as well as the recently announced Happn.in Feed – the ability to talk directly with your city over the Twitters.

We add cities based on Twitter activity and user feedback – so if you would like to see your city on the Happn.in list, let us know and get others in your city to Twitter about it.

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Talk to Your City: Twitter and Broadcasting

Posted by Matthew Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:43:00 GMT

We recently rolled out a new feature at Happn.in called the City Feed (or, as we also call it: Talk to Your City). On each city page, in addition to the top current Twitter trends, you now have the ability to send a tweet directly to your city. You also have the ability to recommend tweets that other people have sent to the City Feed. Those tweets and users that are recommended more often will be displayed more prominently, which gives each city the collective ability to decide on the content that is shown in their feed.

Screen shot 2009-09-02 at 10.55.25 PM.png

This new feature is just one part of a larger roll-out that includes our upcoming iPhone application and Twitter’s recent geo-location announcement. The importance of this feature can best be explained by the difference between broadcasting and reception.

Broadcasting and Reception

Broadcasting is “to tell (something) to many people”. It’s mostly used in reference to Radio and Television – two communication devices that allow one signal to be sent to many people at once. In his book Here Comes Everybody Clay Shirky calls this type of communication, “one-to-many”: “I talk, and talk, and talk, and all you can do is choose to listen or tune out” (pg. 87).

Tools like Twitter and Blogger, however, change broadcasting from a one-to-many relationship into a many-to-many relationship. If you have a connection to the internet, you can not only receive signals from lots of sources, you can send them as well. You are a broadcaster.

All of that is good and smart and interesting. Using Twitter, we all have the ability to send and receive information. The problem we’ve experienced recently, however, is that while Twitter has become a good way for people to receive relevant information (trends, hashtags, searches), it’s not nearly as effective a way to send information. Twitter is still a pretty poor broadcast machine. Currently, when you send out a tweet, you are sending it out to no one in particular. You may have a couple hundred followers, but the chances are that those followers have no real cohesion among themselves. A tweet sent to your followers is a little like shouting out to everyone who is on the bus with you – there is some similarity to all of you (you are all on a bus); but the similarity is random and tenuous. The connection between you and your followers is indirect.

twitter-broadcast.png

When you receive your tweets, however, they all seem to come directly from each individual person you follow. When you look at your Twitter stream, you see all the little messages with user names and profile pictures; it looks like these people are talking to you. The connection between you and the people you follow is more direct.

twitter-reception.png

Combined, you can see why Twitter overwhelmingly feels like a good place to receive information, but a bad way to send it. Each of your tweets is sent to no one in particular, while you are inundated by messages from specific individuals.

twitter-combined.png

The only cases where this isn’t true, of course, is when you have a way of sending a tweet to a cohesive group. In those cases, you send information to a group you know is looking for it. Famous people are able to do this out-of-the-box with Twitter. Their followers are a cohesive group already. When they tweet, they know to whom they are tweeting; and the people who follow them do so actively. But that’s just using Twitter like it was a radio station – just another example of one-to-many communication.

Some groups form through the use of hashtags. A bunch of Twitterers all at the same event, for instance, might all use the same hashtag to send their tweet specifically to the group at that event. And those same people can then search for that hashtag to see all the tweets being broadcast to that event. In that case, the group is cohesive and is also many-to-many. But it’s also ephemeral. After the event is done, the use of the hashtag ceases as does the group.

The Importance of Broadcasting to a Group

The problem with a communication tool more suited to reception than broadcasting is that it’s not sustainable; eventually, you’ve got a lot of people listening and no one talking. In order to become sustainable, Twitter needs tools that make it a better broadcast machine for many-to-many communication. One way to do that is to give people more opportunities to broadcast their tweets to a cohesive group. You become a more effective broadcaster when you know to whom you are tweeting. Location provides an obvious way to do this. With Happn.in’s new City Feed, you can not only receive information from a particular city; you can send information to that city as well. Communication works better when you are talking to a particular group rather than to a group of no one in particular.

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Twitter, Geo-Tagging, and the Importance of Location

Posted by Matthew Fri, 21 Aug 2009 22:23:00 GMT

Location: The New Feature

The folks at Twitter recently announced an upcoming feature that will make Twitter truly location-aware. (Read: Location, Location, Location) While the details are still coming, the basic idea is that folks will have the ability to geo-code their tweets. Geo-coding will make each individual tweet a mark on a map. If you have geo-coding enabled and you tweet, “I’m at such and such a restaurant”, Twitter will code that tweet with the actual latitude and longitude of that restaurant.

This is cool because, as they write:

[W]ith accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city—whether you follow them or not. It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake.

The Happn.in Philosophy

We applaud this move by Twitter. Happn.in started with the idea that Twitter had reached an unmanageable size; and without the ability to filter Twitter by something other than numbers, Twitter was becoming mostly useless

We are not claiming to have moved the Twitter mountain towards location; but we are excited that the Mt. Twitter is moving in the direction we think is useful and interesting.

As we said in our previous post, “to become truly, sustainably useful, Twitter needs tools that organize and filter its information based on criteria other than size.” By adding geo-coded tweets, Twitter has created some strong material from which to build those tools.

The Impact on Happn.in

When it goes live, geo-coding will give us at Happn.in better, more accurate local trends. Currently, if you have your location set to Austin, but are tweeting from a concert in Houston, we have to ascribe your tweet to Austin. In the future, if you’ve enabled geo-coding, that tweet would be counted as a Houston conversation, making Happn.in a more accurate representation of Local Twitter Trends.

But possibly more importantly: we have ideas. Oh, do we have ideas. We have been thinking about how location plays into Twitter for a while now, and this allows us to go big. While I will not lie to you and say we have several geo-coded features ready to release, I can say that we are very interested in using Twitter as a local broadcast and conversation tool; a way to make your city or town better and more connected (check out the conversation bar we’ve set up in Austin). Obviously we don’t think getting everyone on Twitter makes a town better (that would be a weird thing to think); but we do think making local conversation easier can’t hurt.

(Via Waxy.Org.)

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The Trendy Moon

Posted by Matthew Wed, 29 Jul 2009 19:38:00 GMT

The word Moon has appeared on Happn.in over 1200 times (meaning it’s been a part of nearly 1200 trends). This is a lot of trends. What’s interesting to me, however, is how the same word – moon – can show up in wildly different trends

Take two of the biggest news stories from the past month:

  1. Michael Jackson’s Death
  2. The 40th anniversary of Apollo 11

Different stories obviously, but both stories showed up on Happn.in through the word ‘moon’. In the case of MJ: moon walk and in the case of Apollo 11: moon landing

What’s odd is how infrequently the word ‘moon’ actually shows up in a trend just about the moon itself. It really only shows up when people say full moon

Otherwise you get references to beer (blue moon), to music (sun kil moon), or to the greatest t-shirt of all time (three wolf moon).

By far the most popular trend in which the word ‘moon’ shows up has to do with the sequel to that movie Twilight. It’s called New Moon. It’s been a trend in some form or another over 700 times. WHICH IS TO SAY: over 50% of the time the word ‘moon’ has been used.

The complete list of different trends in which the word ‘moon’ has appeared.

  • ban ki-moon
  • blue moon
  • blue over moon
  • button moon
  • dragon moon festival
  • moon landing
  • full moon
  • funny moon
  • half moon
  • half moon bay
  • happy moon
  • moon pie
  • jamario moon
  • killing moon
  • lullaby moon
  • moon available
  • moon over
  • moon looks
  • moon river
  • moon rock
  • moon tonight
  • moon trailer
  • moonwalk
  • new moon
  • sailor moon
  • saw moon
  • see moon
  • seeing moon
  • sun kil moon
  • wolf moon

All of these findings were made using the Happn.in Labs

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International Cities on Happn.in

Posted by Matthew Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:43:00 GMT

Some preamble before I get to the main point

Happn.in collects local Twitter trends (as you hopefully know if you are reading this blog). While conceptually this is straightforward, in practice there are a number of interesting problems, not least of which is the spam problem. Twitter, like the rest of the internet, is covered in non-nutritious spam. We have a number of methods to rid the Happn.in updates of spam. Most effectively, we have human editors who review the local trend lists and identify spam-like tweets and users. Once they identify spam, Happn.in knows phrases and users that are likely spam and our trend lists get better and better—with one glaring caveat. The people behind Happn.in only speak English.

The Main Point

We have started to add more and more non-english speaking cities to Happn.in. At first, because of the spam problem, we only included english tweets in the local trend lists. We realized that this was a pretty poor representation of a lot of non-U.S. locales, so recently we decided to include any and all languages in which people are tweeting. We are excited to do this; this is a good thing.

BUT: at the moment, those cities tweeting in languages other than English are going to experience more spam. We apologize for this; and are working to fix it. We are actively recruiting non-English speaking volunteers to join our editorial team; and help us rid our local trend lists of the evil spam that wants to take over everything. If you are interested in volunteering, please contact us. We would be extremely appreciative; and are coming up with ways to make it worth your while (ways including but not limited to T-shirts AND MAYBE STICKERS).

BUT MOSTLY: we are excited to bring Happn.in to more of the world – and for more of the world to bring their conversation and community to Happn.in.

AND A SIDENOTE: If any software developers are interested in a listing of non-human Twitter accounts, we’d be happy to send you ours.

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iPod Touch Giveaway

Posted by Matthew Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:26:00 GMT

To celebrate and announce the upcoming Happn.in iPhone application, we are giving away an iPod Touch on July 10. Here’s the deal:

To enter, just @-reply Happn.in within Twitter – that’s @happn_in (note the underscore). We will randomly choose one winner on July 10 at 5 PM Eastern Time.

TO INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING (three-fold): be sure you are a follower of one of the Happn.in cities on Twitter – check the list to find the city nearest you.

Happn.in makes Twitter more useful (see this recent blog post for why we think Twitter is mostly not useful right now) – we collect local data so you can see what people are Twittering about around you. Currently, we have over 130,000 people following 67 Happn.in cities worldwide. With our upcoming iPhone application, we’re going give our users even more ways to engage with their local community through Twitter.

Starting Sunday July 5, you can throw your name in the hat for our 8 GB iPod Touch Giveaway, and on Friday, July 10 at 5 PM Eastern, we’ll choose one of you at random.

Contest Rules

  1. Contest runs from July 5 through July 10.
  2. You enter by replying to @happn_in from your Twitter Account (doesn’t matter what you say, but if you use profane or offensive language, we’ll disqualify you and think lowly of you).
  3. If, on July 10th, you are a follower of one of the 67 Happn.in Cities, you will be three times as likely to win the contest (think of it like this: anyone can get a raffle ticket, but Happn.in followers get THREE raffle tickets). You can see the full list (with links to their Twitter accounts) at Happn.in. You can follow more than one city, of course, but this won’t increase your chances.
  4. A winner will be chosen at random on Friday, July 10 at 5 PM Eastern; and will be announced via the official Happn.in Twitter User (@happn_in)
  5. The winner must provide us with a legit mailing address within 7 days of the announcement. We will attempt to contact the winner through Twitter Direct Message (though, that person must follow @happn_in for us to be able to do that). The 8 GB iPod Touch will be sent out within 7 days after receiving the mailing address.
  6. We reserve the right to change or update these rules as necessary.

OK SO: Good luck. Any questions, definitely let us know either through Twitter or our Feedback Page. We will update this blog post with any Frequently Asked Questions or Rule Updates as the contest continues.

Update (June 10, 2009)

OUR WINNER IS: @paulgerhardt. Yeay! Congratulations to Paul; and everyone else: THANK YOU! It was a really fun week. We were excited by all the response and feedback.

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Advertising on Happn.in - New Developments

Posted by Matthew Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:58:00 GMT

You’ve been able to advertise on Happn.in since the beginning, but today we introduce two developments that make advertising easier and better. In addition to sponsoring a Happn.in list (as you know, Happn.in compiles top local trends for 67 cities worldwide and sends out the current list four times a day), you can now also now buy a Full Tweet Ad, an entire targeted tweet to the city (or cities) you want. We’ve also made the process of purchasing ad space on Happn.in way simpler and streamlined.

See the Advertising Overview to get started.

NOW, at the risk of sounding like those people, we actually, truly believe that advertising on Happn.in offers something unique and cost-effective. We know that ads can be gross; and ads on the internet can blink and dance; but ads can also be helpful and successful. We serve up ads to a local Twitter audience, something you can’t do anywhere else, and we try/want to do it in a non-obtrusive, non-annoying way.

Full Tweet Ads

Once a day, we send out a full ad to each of our 67 cities. When you buy the ad slot for that city, your message gets sent out to a targeted localized list of Twitter users. Advertising on Happn.in is the only way to tweet directly to a local Twitter audience.

Again, we only do this once a day, so your ad gets great exposure without annoying the Happn.in audience.

Full Tweet Ads cost $5

List Sponsorships

Four times a day, Happn.in sends out the list of top local Twitter trends to over (at the time of writing) 130,000 people in 67 cities. Each of these lists offers sponsorship space. Your name or business is included in the list that is tweeted out and stamped onto the full list that lives back at Happn.in.

List Sponsorships cost $2

Buy Credits in Bulk

Starting today, instead of buying advertising slots one by one, you can purchase advertising credits in one transaction; and then just pick the advertising slots you want. 1 credit = $1. And we throw in free credits the more you buy. These credits get stored with your account, so you can use them up all in one go or over time.

Any questions or feedback from the perspective of an advertiser or a diehard Happn.in user, please let us know

See the Advertising Overview to get started.

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