Your nightlife tweets can improve urban planning
Tweeting about your fun night out with the gang could do much more than just instill FOMO in your followers -- it could help improve your city, too. At least that's what two computer researchers, Vanessa and Enrique Frías-Martínez, from Telefonica University and the University of Maryland respectively, have proposed in a recent study published in the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence. The brother-and-sister duo theorizes that the geolocation and timestamp data provided by millions of tweets could be used as a complementary source to figure out where and when urban density occurs. In particular, Twitter could be used to determine nightlife activity, which has traditionally been a blind spot in urban planning.
For example, the researchers presented three case studies involving Manhattan, London and Madrid, and discovered that Madrid saw more evening Twitter activity in the weekends, while Manhattan's night-time tweets occurred mostly on weekdays. London, it seems, gets more tweets in the daytime, and mostly in leisure areas. All of this data could potentially be of use in figuring out where and when to allocate valuable city resources like security and cleaning, and how to deal with the issue of noise pollution. Of course, Twitter doesn't present a total picture -- geolocation data is still opt-in, and not everyone tweets on their comings and goings. Still, it does provide additional information on land use that urban planners could find useful. At least now we won't feel so bad tweeting about our out-and-about shenanigans this New Year's Eve.
