Embed Doc
Copy Link
Readcast
Collections

CommentGo Back

Download

An Overview of

Gloe

hpgloe.comIn this document we describe the

Gloe service from a user’s perspective. The goal of this document is to highlight the primary ideas behind the service and to inspire users totake advantage of the available features more effectively. We also present a number of use cases showing how the service may be used in practice in different settings.

What is Gloe?

Gloe is a general purpose geotagging service with one simple primary goal: to map Webcontent to geographic regions. The idea is to take advantage of local expertise whensurfing the Web in a particular location to find relevant content more effectively. Anyonewho uses the service or surfs the Web can recommend or bookmark Web content theyfind relevant in their current location. The user interface to Gloe is a feed of recommendations of the most popular Web content in the form of links to Web pagescustomized for the current location. The feed can be filtered by channels, which arearbitrary hierarchical categories determined by how users tag Web pages. With the intentto automate the search for the users, we also present a popular channel feed or a tag cloudfor the current location to help users discover what channels it may make sense to filteron. To personalize the recommendations further we allow users to filter the results by justshowing their previous recommendations or recommendations from their friends.

Background

The World Wide Web revolutionized the way we find information. Access to informationanytime from anywhere regardless of where the information is hosted was the key tosuccess. As the Web grew it became increasingly hard to navigate through the highestquality information. Web search engines came to the rescue, giving you a tool to type in asimple key word query and get a ranked list of the most popular and high quality Webpages. As location-aware devices with Web access such as smartphones and netbooks arebecoming a commodity, what worked so well in the past of abstracting away contentgeographies is being revisited by Location Based Services (LBSs). Most LBS systemstoday create their own ecosystem of information, to a large degree ignoring the wealth of information on the traditional WWW. Furthermore, most LBS systems are providercentric, relying on providers to register information with the service. Both of thesedesign choices lead to limited geographic coverage and missing long tail content(information only useful to a negligible fraction of the population). Unfortunately thesefeatures were the hallmarks of the traditional Web, and the recipe for its great success. Afew wiki-inspired crowd contribution LBSs do exist today but they lack the incentives forusers to contribute.

What problem is Gloe solving?

As more devices have access to the Web and more people contribute content to the Webwe are suffering from

information overflow

. This problem is exacerbated on smalldevices with limited screens, input controls, and bandwidth. To solve this problem, and topiggy-back on the success of the Web browser interface including the upcoming HTML 5geolocation support, we designed a geo-aware market for local Web content that givesincentives to (and makes it very low-effort for) both consumers and providers tocontribute and evaluate content. Our solution allows non-intrusive plug-ins to be writtenfor existing browsers to enhance the local search experience without taking away fromthe well-known, well-proven browser interface. Finally, our service is designed to work well on limited bandwidth devices with small visual real-estate by automatically bubblingup the most relevant and popular content in a filtered, ranked list of recommendations.

How does Gloe work?

Gloe is designed around a massively parallel backend where data are split across smallregions that can be efficiently queried for all information in a geographic area. Thismeans that local search is very fast at the expense of global search not being supported inreal-time. Each recommendation by a user is recorded as the URL, title, latitude-longitude coordinate, and an arbitrary tag. The recommendation feeds are constructed bysimply aggregating over recommendations for the same URL within a region determinedby a latitude-longitude epicenter and a radius. To ensure high-quality contributions and toinfer popularity more accurately (i.e. to give the right incentives to both consumers andproviders of information to contribute), all users in the system are granted arecommendation budget. This budget is used when making recommendations in thesystem. The users specify how much of the budget to use on each recommendation,which can be compared to rating an item on, e.g. a 5 star scale in a traditionalrecommendation system. When running out of budget, no more recommendations can bemade. To simplify the interface to users, a recommendation by default spends 1 creditand to, e.g., spend two credits the user could recommend the Web page twice. Theaggregate budget spending on a URL in a geographic region is the ultimate metric forpopularity in Gloe, and it is what is used to rank the recommendations. Informationproviders don’t necessarily need an incentive to contribute and may even be willing topay to contribute because they typically want to promote their own content. However,information consumers may need to be given an explicit incentive to evaluate andrecommend content, for example, having budgets be reset periodically in a use-it-or-lose-it mechanism.

How can I use Gloe?

Gloe can be used today for all the use cases described next. The service is designed as anopen-ended general purpose Cloud service that can be used on many different platforms.Currently we have clients for all major desktop Web browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE,Google Chrome). We have native apps for Android and RIM/BlackBerry, and the servicehas also been tested to work well from iPhones (supports HTML 5 to obtain the GPSlocation) and iPAQs using their respective Web browsers.

3The following list of use cases is hence just for inspiration and not exhaustive. We wouldlove to see users come up with new ways to leverage this simple yet powerful new modelof Web content recommendation. As a further disclaimer we don’t claim that there are noother services that allow you to address these use cases individually, but we do claim thatthere is no other service that incorporates all these diverse use cases with the ease of Gloe. We stress that all of these use cases can be accommodated with the current Gloeuser interface, but we also welcome new Gloe mash-ups with specialized interfaces tosolve any of these use cases more specifically using the Gloe REST API (See the separateAPI documentation).

Local Business/POI Search

Because Gloe is an LBS at its core it can be used like any other LBS to find localrestaurants, hotels and points of interest (POI). The difference is that Gloe has a uniformrating system regardless of who hosts the content and the content can be contributed byanyone, including Web crawls to get better coverage than traditional LBSs.

Personal Bookmarking

One of the key incentives for information consumers to contribute ratings and new Webpage recommendations is to build up a personal geo-aware list of bookmarks that can berevisited and presented without any risk to drown in the global information flow. Imaginefor instance going to a conference or a sales visit and tagging the restaurants you dine atwith your local colleagues or customers so that you can easily find the good restaurants atyour next visit.

Social Search

Social search is an extension of the personal bookmarking use case. Imagine you aretraveling to a new location for your vacation, and you know that your colleagues orfriends have been there before. You can then filter your recommendations in that locationon what your friends and colleagues recommend. Another example of this use case iswhen you want to buy a new car (or find a dentist, a repair shop, or an ethnic restaurant),but you are not familiar with the businesses in the area and you don’t trust arbitraryrecommendations from anonymous users on the Web. You can then select a subset of your friends who you trust have good taste and knowledge of what you are looking for tofilter your recommendations.

Geographic Polls

Gloe builds on the same concepts as information and prediction markets that have shownto work well to forecast future outcomes by aggregating guesses over many people whoare forced to put skin in the game (typically through some market mechanism). Youcould thus imagine a political candidate polling her constituency for opinions on differentissues and analyzing the results by geographies to determine where and how it makessense to target her campaign. Similarly a start-up may want to do a market study of thepotential for a new product in different geographies to determine at what scale and whereto sell the eventual product and where to target ad campaigns.