New York — There is a cool blend of local element to real-time search, and Sency, the start-up web site that monitors Twitter traffic based on location, last week at the Real-Time web summit at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City, launched its trends engine for popular places–has taken a leap towards marrying trending content and location that are popular right now inside of 24 major cities.
While trends engines have been concentrating on displaying the most popular topics, Sency is the first to launch trends which display the names of actual places. The concept of trends usually revolves around topics, but Sency is instead focusing on places. The company’s announcement says trending places are available in 24 cities, such as Seattle:
“To date, real-time search has been centered upon displaying what people are saying and sharing right now,” states Evan Britton, Founder of Sency. “The future of this industry will revolve around what people are saying inside of cities and at popular places. In addition, users will be interested in discovering which places inside a given city are hot right now based on location based check-ins and chatter.”
“New York was the foremost among major city we launched in,” Britton said in a statement.
Established on Twitter’s geo-tagging capability, Sency differs from many startups. First, it is a desktop experience. Secondly, it does not require membership. Anyone can turn to the web page, click on New York, and find out, for example, what people are tweeting about or what links they are sharing about anything timely that is going on.
Britton says, “Twitter has so much data that can be rendered and displayed in new ways. The key to Sency is our ability to take useful, interesting real-time data and simplify it for better consumption by users. While we do have some plans to build our own data, our focus is more on compiling, archiving, and formatting data so that we can display in new ways.”
Sency delivers its popular places trends via two categories. The first, titled “Popular Places Now,” column is exactly what it sounds like, it displays the places in a given city which are the most popular right now. The second, titled “Popular Places Lately,” column is trending places over the past few days. Each popular place becomes its own webpage allowing the user to get the address and street map of the given place. There is no display of the tweets related to that place, which would make a good addition to add context.
The company plans to extend its functionality so that users can see the latest comments being made in certain limited areas of the city, such as JFK Airport, Yankee Stadium, and Penn Station, Britton said.
The technology empowers visitors to Sency’s city based real-time search engines to see which places are popular right now and lately. The places trends are available for Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC & London, as well as 10 additional cities.
The company is building out in NY, and soon will unfold the ability to accumulate tweets in the same location on the same subject and rank them. That way, website users can find out what the most talked about subject in New York will be at any given time, Britton said.
Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Santa Monica, the company is focused on bringing real-time content, links, and tools, to internet users in an organized and simple fashion.
You can visit sency.com and click on any of the city names listed within the top navigational bar to get to a respective city page.