From EU Project to the App Store: SocialSensor Releases Mobile App for Journalists
,From late 2011 until October 2014, the Deutsche Welle Innovation Projects team participated in the EC co-funded project SocialSensor. The project dealt with the collection, processing and aggregation of large volumes of social media data and multimedia content in order to discover trends, events, influencers and interesting media content in Social Networks. Overall, SocialSensor achieved some impressive outcomes.
One of the results is the SocialSensor mobile application for news professionals. During the development phase, the DW team was responsible for collecting and gathering the requirements of professional journalists. This was to make sure that subsequent developments were user-centred and met clear journalistic and prospective market needs. The work of the DW team furthermore focussed on the usability of SocialSensor interfaces and the system as a whole.
The SocialSensor app (at the project's end in beta status) now analyses and detects trends from multiple Social Networks including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Flickr and Google+. It has been released in Apple's iTunes app store and can be downloaded here.
The app automatically surfaces the most 'newsworthy' and fast moving trends. It aggregates pictures, hashtags and posts from multiple networks. The results can be filtered by time, network, location, popularity, recency or by the trust of those in the network. Some further features of the SocialSensor news application are:
- crawling and analysing multimedia User Generated Content (UGC) from Social Networks,
- combining UGC with professional content and making it searchable, and
- recommending, delivering and presenting the content to users depending on their context and personal preferences.
The mobile application is currently under evaluation for further improvement. It is a beta version and feedback and ideas on how to improve the functionality are very much welcome (you can use the feedback feature in the app itself).
More information about the objectives and outcomes of SocialSensor can be found on the project's homepage. This includes publications, project reports, software for download, datasets and other apps (among them an app for the organisation and running of large events, as used by the Thessaloniki Film Festival and the Fête de la Musique in Berlin).
For further information please contact the DW team that dealt with SocialSensor:
- Nicolaus Heise (nicolaus.heise@dw.de)
- Jochen Spangenberg (jochen.spangenberg@dw.de)
- Andreas Giefer (andreas.giefer@dw.de)
