Researchers at Yahoo!, which owns Flickr, has developed a way to gather photos and construct travel itineraries, based on the location of the photos and the time between each picture, in five cities — Barcelona, London, Paris, New York, and San Francisco.
Yahoo! figured out which photos were from tourists based on the amount of time the users stayed in a city, and then they mapped out “timed paths” based on the pictures. Some of the photos on Flickr include people in them, but the tool itself is designed to provide itineraries, not those photos, even though they are public.
The tool was presented by researchers at a recent technology conference to demonstrate the possibilities of harnessing Flickr’s technology and valuable user-generated content for new applications. Though not available to the public, researcher Munmun De Choudhury said, “that it’s something that could be constructed by a software developer using Flickr’s free interface.” And the next step, she said, “would be refining the algorithms or gathering more data so that users get recommendations based on their preferences — like a love of art museums — or get itineraries for places farther off the beaten path”.
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