Whoo.ly: Facilitating Information Seeking For Hyperlocal Communities Using Social Media

TL;DR

Whoo.ly is a web service that automatically extracts and summarizes hyperlocal information from Twitter to help users find relevant neighborhood news and events more easily than traditional social media streams.

Contribution

The paper introduces Whoo.ly, a novel system with unique event detection and summarization algorithms tailored for hyperlocal social media content.

Findings

Most users found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter.

Participants preferred Whoo.ly for neighborhood exploration.

The system effectively summarizes hyperlocal events and topics.

Abstract

Social media systems promise powerful opportunities for people to connect to timely, relevant information at the hyper 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 neighborhoods.