Happn.in is the latest built-on-Twitter business to incorporate a geolocal flavor. The website, created by Pomelo, LLC, a software development firm, finds popular phrases being Twittered by people within 20 miles of your city. Basically it only works with phrases. It doesn’t take hashtags, URLs and usernames into consideration. It judges popular phrases by comparing the ratio of users tweeting a phrase within the last hour with the mean percentage of users who used the phrase over the past week.
Right now Happn.in covers 52 major cities across the globe and has plans for more in the future. The business also accepts sponsorships for other cities for $2 a tweet. So, for instance, I could sponsor Winnipeg for 7 days, with popular phrase tweets going out 4 times per day for $56. Users can also see the full aggregration of popular phrases on the Happn.in website at any time.
In the future, Happn.in plans to find new ways to aggregrate data besides location. For example, if Twitter adds groups, popular phrases could be pulled from specific groups of your friends or co-workers. There’s also some work going on behind the scenes to get data visualizations up on the site as well.