PopTech : Blog : Zehn Luftballons: Riley Crane and the power of social networking

Zehn Luftballons: Riley Crane and the power of social networking

Kiley Lambert ( Bio / Posts ) | Saturday, October 23, 2010 UTC

Riley Crane found out about the DARPA network challenge (find ten balloons placed in ten different locations around the country) four days before it started. Four days, eight hours, and 52 minutes later his team, the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team, had won it.

How they did it is a testament to the power of crowdsourcing solutions and the ability of social networking to tackle seemingly impossible tasks. Crane’s approach was to set up a system in which every person who volunteered to help was given a unique URL that could be shared with that person’s social networks (primarily via Twitter and Facebook). The process was repeated over and over again. Everyone who signed on was guaranteed a part of the $40,000 prize purse if the team won.

This family tree approach gave Crane’s team access to the collective power of an extraordinary number of individual networks. Slashdot posted an open letter from the MIT team (best comment: "re: balloons – will there be a little boy trapped inside each one?”), which massively increased interest, and Crane’s team was able to access even more networks.

“We came in after we set it up and we felt pretty good about it,” he said from the stage Saturday. “But then we saw what had happened.” Epic balloon fail – the system was working too well. People were sighting hundreds of balloons; Crane said some teams even set up dummy balloons in an attempt to sabotage the system.

“We went in and said ‘Okay, if the IP address is in San Francisco and the person is saying they saw the balloon in Florida, it goes in the trash.’” Eliminating the noise revealed ten locations – eight real ones and two dummies. Finding the remaining two was only a matter of time. In all, Crane’s team was first to find four of the balloons.

“It was a great network and winning the challenge was fun, but the real question is: what can we use it for?” Crane said. “If we want to see new things happen that are going to blow our minds, we need to start to really rethinking the way we communicate. If we do the world will become really responsive to large-scale change.”

(Photo credit: Kris Krüg)

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