
Crowd Sourcing Sucked, So I Put Instagram API to Work Instead - shaharsol
http://shaharsol.com/2012/09/27/crowd-sourcing-sucked-so-i-put-instagram-api-to-work-instead/
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thaas53
It could also be that surfers don't want to share the great conditions with
others so they can enjoy them without the congestion?

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klenwell
I'm glad to see someone trying this. I very (very) casually explored this same
idea recently by just browsing the search features of Instagram and Flickr.
The results weren't very promising so I concluded it probably wasn't worth
investing further effort in the API. Looking at the Huntington Beach results
for this morning on the swellphone website, I don't see a lot that would
interest surfers:

[http://swellphone.com/spot/surf-
spot/usa/california/huntingt...](http://swellphone.com/spot/surf-
spot/usa/california/huntington-beach)

And I would expect that to be one of the more popular spots.

When I was in school at UCSD years ago, I found scraping NOAA buoy data and
loosely correlating it with personal experience was a good enough predictor as
to whether it was worth the walk down to Blacks. But this is what surfline.com
does at scale.

Incidentally, anyone know what happened to the site surfshot.com? I believe
their model was just to send a couple photographers down the San Diego coast
each morning and post pictures. Site has been around for years and worked well
enough, I thought, but it hasn't updated since July.

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mooreds
Your story proves that sometimes you have to find a bigger crowd and/or a
different approach, not that crowd sourcing sucks.

Either way, nice work!

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smcguinness
Very cool usage. What is your next step? As you said, most but not all
pictures have pictures of the water. Have you thought about using CV to detect
water in the background as the next possible iteration to remove pictures that
do not show conditions.

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shaharsol
I thought about it, however it will make things more complicated. Currently I
get the pics unfiltered from Instagram. If I need further processing, I need
to process each image and cache the results, then compare the feed per spot
for the next request for the same spot etc. It's not that it's not doable
though.

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sixQuarks
I hate to say it, but this "solution" doesn't work. It was a good idea worth
testing, but it's just not useful.

I'm not a surfer, but if surfers are dying for this kind of info, wouldn't
they be willing to pay a subscription fee for access to an up-to-date surf
report?

These days with TaskRabbit.com, you can hire someone to go take pictures at
multiple times throughout the day. Let's say you can get your costs down to
$25/day, which is about $750/month per surf "spot".

You would need to get 38 surfers paying $19.95 per month to break even. How
many surfers do you think would be interested in this per location?

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swang
Why take just a picture? Have the guy take a video panning the entire ocean
for 15? 30? seconds and then allow surfers to view video. Capture some random
images of the video for people who don't want to look at video.

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shaharsol
I agree that video is a better way to communicate the surfing conditions. This
is why I added Youtube videos as well to the SwellPhone feed. However, Youtube
seems to have far less geo tagged UGC media than Instagram.

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davidjhamp
I started surfing about a year ago and I initially thought of the crowd
sourced conditions app but I realized that people hate giving that info away
and that friends form SMS based surf checking networks that serve the same
purpose.

I really like this approach and could see it working at popular, touristy
spots, clever idea.

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zerian1515
Not sure I am a fan of the geo targeted default. Wish I could see my default
to Hawaii North shore. Also would be nice if I could click on the images and
link to the instragram post. Dig the concept and the site. Well executed.

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shaharsol
In the mobile app version there's an "Add to Favorites" functionality and a
"Favorites" tab. You can add Pipeline and other North Shore as favorites and
easily follow them. That's missing from the website though.

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jacalata
Nice creative solution. I looked through the website and found a couple spots
with no photos - it might be worth putting a note saying 'no photos found', I
reloaded the page because it just looked like it hadn't loaded an element.

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netvarun
Why isn't Singapore[1] in the list of countries on swellphone.com?

[1]<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singapore>

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slajax
Very cool. I tried to do something similar with FB checkins but for Snow
Reports. Same problem. Using instagram to source the reports is an smart
detour.

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aliukani
That's a really clever solution! A side benefit is you also get to leave the
reporting method and report hosting to Instagram

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treelovinhippie
Might want to fix the spelling mistake on the first line on your site.
Otherwise, cool out-of-the-box idea.

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shaharsol
Fixed! Thanks!

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nobody_nowhere
Congrats on coming up with a really clever way to approach crowdsourcing!

