Why nobody can tell you how the city is feeling
You can find the temperature of any city on Earth in a second. How the people in it are feeling is another matter. On the night of a final, a storm, an election or the first warm Saturday of spring, the question "how is the city feeling today", or "what is the mood in Paris right now", gets answered by whoever is loudest: a trending topic, a news crew on one corner, a feed tuned to show what provokes.
Polls are slow and ask a sample, a week later, about a moment that has passed. Social media is fast but measures what people post, which is not how they are, and the posts that travel furthest are the angriest ones. Neither can answer a small question at all: what is the mood on your campus, your street, in the café you are sitting in.
What weathr does
Every place is a ladder of eight. Venue, address, postcode, city, state or province, country, continent, planet. Standing somewhere puts your mood in all eight at once, so your café and your country are read from the same tap.
One person is enough. A place's weather is the proportion of the moods of the people in it, not a count, so a village where a single person has said how they are has a real sky, and so does a city of thousands. A place with nobody in it yet shows no invented weather.
It is live and it keeps a record. Every half hour the sky is recomputed, with a temperature and a trend. Hours, days and weeks are sealed and never rewritten, so a big night can be looked at the morning after, hour by hour.
A live mood map, and a search. Places are drawn on a map with their weather, down to single streets when you zoom in. You can search for any place by name, and watch places you are not in, so the city you grew up in can sit beside the one you live in.
Places show moods, never people. At a postcode, an address or a venue nobody is ever named, on any setting. A pin says how many and how they are, never who.
What it can't tell you
A place's weather is the weathr users standing there and nobody else. It is not a poll of the population, and it is not representative of anyone who has not chosen to be in it. weathr is new, so most real places are thin right now, often a handful of people or none. That is why the live demo shows a world of invented people: so there is a map worth looking at before the real one fills. And weathr only knows where you are if you switch on Follow me, which is off on every device until you press it, so a place counts only those who have. It tells you a city is stormy, never why.
Compared with the usual ways to read a city
| Trending topics | Opinion polls | weathr | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it measures | What people post | A sample's answers | How its users say they are |
| How current | Minutes | Days or weeks | Every half hour |
| Works for a street or a café | No | No | Yes |
| Names individuals | Yes | No | No, places show moods only |
| Represents the whole population | No | Designed to | No |
Questions
How can I see the mood of my city right now?
Search for it in weathr or find it on the map. Every place with weathr users in it has weather, recomputed every half hour from the moods of the people standing there, with a timeline you can look back through. You can watch a city you are not in.
Is a place's weather a poll of everyone who lives there?
No. It is the moods of the weathr users standing in that place, and nobody else. weathr is new, so most real places are thin for now. The live demo shows a world of invented people so there is something to look at.
Can someone see that I am at a particular café or address?
No. At a postcode, an address or a venue nobody is ever named, on any setting. Those places show a mood and a headcount, not people.
Does weathr track my location?
Only if you turn on Follow me, a switch on each device that is off until you press it. Turning it off stops that device reporting; it does not move you anywhere.