Jay Goldman

Cool post on the Flickr Developer Blog about using the geocoded data in all of their photos (90m images worth as of now and growing rapidly as the world’s iPhone’s upload more and more geo-tagged photos) to calculate the shape of the region the photo was taken in.

North America as defined by photo geocode data

There are a bunch of things that make me all schoolgirl-giggly about it:

• Talk about thinking outside the box: they’re actually using their data to define the box. This kinda reminds me of the Microsoft Photosynth project, which uses many photos of the same physical object to create a 3D model from the image data. I love the idea that our random snapshots and memories carry metadata without our intervention.
• They’re exposing the flaws in their system so that their users can help make it better. I firmly believe that the days of trying to market perfection are starting to fade into the distance and the sooner you accept that your app and software are inherently flawed, the sooner you can move on and build better stuff. In this case, they’re accepting that some of the shapes are way off and encouraging people to organize photowalks around the perimeter of a region to help improve their calculations. Awesome idea for your neighbourhood, less practical for North America. Still though — recipe for winning product design: build something cool, share it with your passionate users, give them the tools to make it better.
• Although it probably still only makes sense to mathematicians, they’ve described their complex math in terms of ice cream. You cannot fail when you use the ice cream approach.

Imagine a huge mass of ice-cream making up the space … and containing the points as hard chocolate pieces. Using one of those sphere-formed ice-cream spoons we carve out all parts of the ice-cream block we can reach without bumping into chocolate pieces, thereby even carving out holes in the inside (eg. parts not reachable by simply moving the spoon from the outside). We will eventually end up with a (not necessarily convex) object bounded by caps, arcs and points. If we now straighten all round faces to triangles and line segments, we have an intuitive description of what is called the alpha shape…

• The hard math stuff (i.e.: the ICE CREAM) is done by a little program called Clustr, which they’ve released under the GPL (version 2) so you can use it in your apps.

Things like this make me <3 the Internet that much more. Cool people building cool things and sharing them with the community.

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