Mashable shares the news of a whimsical little app experiment called Happstr (developed on the “Startup Bus,” winding its way to SXSW in Austin). Happstr is a website designed for your mobile device, with geotagging, that lets you press a large pink button when you’re feeling happy, to mark the place (and the reason) for that happiness. You can see happy places from other people on a map. And while you can’t see why they were happy (that information is private), you can see where they were happy.
While it’s a fun little gimmick for the user, it could be a powerful indicator for a city, or a region, or a particular organization. At the least, it offers a useful thought experiment for the place-based cultural organization: What would have to do to encourage more visitors to hit that button — to be happy — in your venue or your space? And if you can figure that out, why aren’t you doing it now?
It also recalls the “smiles per hour” indicator used by the City of Port Phillip to measure how friendly and welcoming their neighborhoods are. Happstr could eventually offer a similar metric for people interested in a similar quality in the places they inhabit.
Can you measure happiness? Sure you can. Can you foster more of it in your little circle of the world? Give it a try.
I predict that it will be roughly 48 hours before publicists and social media “optimizers” start “astroturfing” Happstr to make it look like the places they represent are especially happy-making.
Andrew:
Thanks for sending this. I’ve been doing some work recently on geo-mapping. UNESCO as well has some great resources on identifying significant meaning making places.
I’ll go to the SXSW site to see your happy posts there.
This is a great idea but not a new. A similar startup – Happie.st.
Snapshot from a web archive (19.07.2011) – http://web.archive.org/web/20110719122400/http://happie.st/