A social network that ballooned
Last Tuesday, members of the MIT Media Lab’s Human Dynamics Laboratory received an e-mail with a $40,000 proposition. The U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was holding a competition that weekend: on Saturday morning, 10 large red weather balloons would be raised at undisclosed locations across the United States; the first team to use social media — like online social networks and communication systems — to determine the correct latitude and longitude of all 10 would receive $40,000.On Wednesday, members of the lab began discussing possible approaches to the problem. By Thursday, they had built a demonstration version of the website they would use to aggregate data, and on Thursday evening the site went live. Within two days, 5,000 people had formally joined the team’s network, out of hundreds of thousands who had visited the site. On Saturday morning the balloons went up, and by the end...