Imagine if you could hear everything everyone in Boston was thinking. Well, everything anyone was thinking on Twitter, anyway.
With the new realtime search engine, Sency, you can listen in on the voices of your city by tapping into region-specific Twitter posts.
Based in Santa Monica, California, Sency was conceived last year when founder, Evan Britton went to a Twitter conference and recognized all the data Twitter was giving away for free. Being one who “believe[s] in real time data,” Evan set off to create a way to harness the “value in what’s being created by the user.” With the help of Boston developer, Dan Nissenbaum, Sency launched in September of 2009.
To give you the basic idea, Sency is a search engine that can mine realtime Twitter data. In this sense it’s similar to a Twitter search, but things get a little more interesting when you find out Sency takes the roughly 55 million daily Twitter updates, filters out the spam, and organizes them by city. Currently you can narrow this Twitter search specific to 14 cities, and we were psyched to see Boston on that list.
Example time: Let’s think back to Tuesday when the Red Sox beat the Yankees, I can search “Sox” just within Boston and read locals’ celebrations about the win or other thoughts about the game. Then, if I wanted to be a jerk about it, I could do that same search for New York and laugh (though probably not for long) at all the woeful teary-eyed tweets from Yankees fans.
There are far more use cases than this, however, (and many less petty) such as searching thoughts on city-specific events, politics, people or products.
Another feature of Sency is that you can scour cities by a list of “places people are at.” This is a really intriguing prospect when you consider the data that’s currently being linked to geographic locations via tools like SCVNGR and Foursquare. Granted the phrase leaves something to be desired in the grammar department, but it makes sense when you see the long list of “I’m at’s” that pop up on Twitter from sources like SCVNGR and Foursqure, it makes sense. This could be really powerful by delivering a stream of updates about more specific locations Bostonians are Tweeting about being at (I’m guessing an Irish pub or a Dunkin’ Donuts).
A future plan for this feature is to compile data so that Sency can give you a list of most popular places in the Twittersphere, so you can hear about, say, the most frequented Boston restaurants directly from the people who are going to them.
Right now, Sency is a fun site in the works toward becoming a very powerful tool. As Evan said, “getting the sense of a city’s consciousness is a powerful thing” and I have to agree. The functionality isn’t perfect, but as geotagging becomes better integrated, and the flow is refined, Sency might become the closest you can get to knowing minute-by-minute what Boston thinks.
