Foursquare Data Hints At London's Cultural Hubs

M@
By M@ Last edited 163 months ago
Foursquare Data Hints At London's Cultural Hubs

LDN-foursquare-web.jpg

Another day, another intriguing visualisation of social data. PhD student Anil Bawa-Cavia has used check-in data from the Foursquare network to gauge London's most popular venues. Foursquare, for those who haven't tried it, is a service that lets you declare your presence in a given location - allowing friends to find you and weirdos to stalk you. Anil has broken the data down into categories. We can see, for example, that the most popular 'nightlife' spot is the Hospital Club in Covent Garden; the top 'arts' venue is the O2 Arena; Camden Lock is best for shops; and Regent's Park tops the green lungs. The results are, of course, enormously skewed towards the haunts of smartphone-wielding media types (um, guess that includes us). But given that the visualisation is drawn from over 162,000 data points, it offers a pretty decent representation of where this demographic hangs out.

Last Updated 24 August 2010