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Geo Twitter (#ll)

Thursday, May 07, 2009 { 7 Comments }

For days I was trying to figure out how to connect Twitter to Google Maps. Trust me is not an easy task because Twitter Apis can give very limited info. And that info is not very precise, for example you can tweet from New York. But New York is very bigggg. I wanted much more precision were exactly from New York you are tweeting or from any other place on earth?

Then I figured out that it’s “mission impossible”. No detailed Twitter API info means no project. And I quit my idea. When I was writing one of my previous posts: “Twitter is not about you, it’s about the community” - Bang! It all came to me. Twitter is community and community is twitter. The idea was born!

Why not just write the Geo coordinates inside your tweet!? It was so fuck*** simple!
After little work and thinking the result:

#ll 0.000000,0.000000

#ll tag stands for Latitude and Longitude. Every space is precious on twitter (that is why I’m using only two letters plus # for the search query) and the geo coordinates separated with coma with no spaces between them.

I think that this tag can revolutionize the way we Tweet. Imagine there are endless possibilities how to use this tag! You can tweet exactly from your office, coffee shop, restaurant, park. You can find who or where is the closest twitter.

Here are some possible scenarios(tweets):

I’m drinking delicious coffee at #ll 40.590362104893345,-73.96055102348328

A lot of traffic at #ll 34.079038136047444,-118.41562271118164

Who wants to join me at: #ll 40.7284295591591,-73.99197578430176

Don’t go there! Aliens just landed #ll 37.240332,-115.816032

For now I have built Twitter Geo that takes the last 20 tweets and inserts them inside Google Map.

The application Geo Twitter #ll

If this project has more community support I will build an application for iphone and other mobile devices that can support Google Maps.
For now you might have around 20 min delay, I'm working on twitter approval for faster apis.

But now everything is in your hands, folks.

If you like this idea you can help by ReTweeting!


P.S Special thanks to my friends Branko & Michele for their support and consulting

7 Responses to “Geo Twitter (#ll)”

1. //  Vladimir // 5/07/2009

   @everyone: Today Twitter API servers are very slow, I'm sorry if your message is not shown to the google map right away. I'm searching the way to get to the "Twitter Api" white list so everything will be in real time.  

2. //  sgruenwald // 5/08/2009

   Very interesting idea, especially when people tweet from cell phones with geolocation coordinates. Unfortunately, Twitter has this 140 character restriction (should be 280 or so), otherwise you could easily incorporate it as a tag. Still, very good idea for the future.  

3. //  Michele // 5/08/2009

   I agree, this web app it's like a "beta", it will upgraded asap!  

4. //  Unknown // 5/31/2009

   I'd say GeoHash is much more suitable, as it gives a *very* compact representation of the position. http://geohash.org/
   
   Additionally, you can decrease accuracy by removing tailing characters (if you don't want to be be too precise).
   
   http://geohash.org/rckpp3j5m  

5. //  Unknown // 7/22/2009

   Check out waze.com it's a social mobile app enabling drivers to share traffic and road info and send 'road tweets' with geo location. Road tweets appear on other driver's client map and on the waze web site map. (product is still in alpha, client is available on android market). It's targeted at drivers though, not for general purpose as you wanted it.  

6. //  Anonymous // 10/16/2009

   It is a good idea but not very easy to do. Also it is easy hard to understand where you are from the long lats. this is why something that uses the full name of the location would be much better.
   This is implemented in multiple ways.
   From using external apis like Placemaker.
   Here is a good example of wath could be done using this. ( http://www.geomojo.org/cgi-bin/map.cgi and http://www.geomojo.org/cgi-bin/geotweets.cgi)  

7. //  Anonymous // 10/22/2009

   meant to be geotweets and Tweets on map
   You might also want to see the blog post about it. on http://geomojo.org/?p=17  

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