The Beat - Instagram Meets Google Street View

The Beat is an experiment from the social media information lab at Rutgers University.  It blends together geotagged Instagram posts with Google Streetview imagery from that location.  The aim is to give users insight into the life of an area by exploring topics in a new way.  It's preloaded with a #Christmas Instagram hashtag so try putting in your own hashtag either geography such as #London or more interestingly exploring other topics via hashtag such as #Movember

It's a really cool way to give context to Instagram photos by seeing what's around them using Google Streetview.  It'd be interesting to see this also integrated into the This Is Now Instagram project that showed a few weeks ago.

Check it out below or have a play around yourself at The Beat
via PSFK

This Is Now

This has nothing to do with advertising, but I thoroughly enjoy it.  This is now is 'a highly addictive real-time visualization tool displaying all the photos as they happen within a city on Instagram.'  
This Is Now scrapes images from Instagram with the hastag #thisisnow and shows you a lovely representation of what’s going on right now in various cities around the world.  Play with it yourself at http://now.jit.su/ or check out the video capture below.



via: Urgent Genius & developed by @marciopuga, @mauriciomassaia and @PerThoresson