Smackathon Project – Sing! Meetups Group Map

Spawning off a little last minute inspiration from the Smule community, team “Also-Awesome” hacked together a way for people in the Sing! Meetups Group to place themselves on a virtual map using hashtags on their favorite performances. In doing so, a visual representation of where clusters of people exist has been created so as to help facilitate planning meetups.

The Inspiration

Firstly — “AdrianSings” conjured up some inspiration when he made the following post, which asked us to develop a way for the Meetups Group to be able to drop pins on a map identifying where they were located

The Implementation

Shae saw this post, confirmed that it wouldn’t be too hard to automate, and Nick suggested the use of a hashtag to identify the people who wanted to be placed on the map.

A post was made in the Meetups Group, asking for people to put the #SingMeetups hashtag on their favorite solo performance in order to carry out Adrian’s vision. This caused 27 performances to be tagged in a very short period of time.

We found the GPS location data for each performance and put it in a spreadsheet

Then imported the .CSV file into a custom google map, and BAM! It functioned as a crude prototype.

The Design

Hannah mocked up a final design which looked beautiful! The location in the final design will only show the city where a person lives instead of their Lat/Lon coordinates in order to maintain privacy.

Future Iterations

In the future, this way displaying a hashtag on the globe could be automatically generated in a number of ways and will be very useful for visualizing any number of trending hashtags, or just creating a playlist of songs and making it more visually interesting instead of having the songs in a list or queue. A global visualization of this type could also be generated for any filter of Sing! Performances such as Song, Artist, Performer, or any Hashtag or Searchable Query.

GG Team Also Awesome!!!

-TK