Wespy
Jenn Martins
Cities (especially New York) are divided in countless ways — grids, neighborhoods, history, socioeconomics, where you have and haven’t been. Wespy is a mobile app that promotes getting to know one’s city in spite of these divisions. The goal of this app is to encourage people to venture into new areas and see new things. This is done via social media data, community input, and the sharing of local information. The audience for my project is urban residents in Manhattan who don’t explore their city on a regular basis and are interested in visiting new spots. The audience would ideally be in their 20s–40s, to target those who are old enough to want to explore and young enough to be able to do so easily. The goal of this app is to encourage people to venture into new areas and see new things. This is done via the aggregation of social media data from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Users login with their existing accounts and all check-ins and geotagged posts are pulled into feeds organized into spots (locations). Users can easily filter or skim through this data, using what their friends are saying about these places to decide where they would like to go. What makes Wespy different from other review or rating websites and apps is that it is personalized to the users’ friends and uses existing information from their social media accounts. Users are not reading anonymous posts, but are reading casual thoughts written or photographed by their own peers. By using existing data, Wespy does not require any extra effort such as taking the time to write reviews.