(2009-01-08) Twitter Geotag

I just noticed that Twitter has some GeoTag data. Mostly from IPhone entries.

Found this post from April'2008 about setting your current location via an API update. I tried the link in the post, and got an error that the call requires an HttpPost (and didn't feel like setting up a fake for that). Also it's unclear to me whether that data is much good, in terms of accurate GeoTag searching. The current API docs say that update_profile can (optionally) update location: Maximum of 30 characters. The contents are not normalized or geocoded in any way. Then you can search with a geocode param: returns tweets by users located within a given radius of the given latitude/longitude, where the user's location is taken from their Twitter profile. The parameter value is specified by "latitide,longitude,radius", where radius units must be specified as either "mi" (miles) or "km" (kilometers). It seems bizarre that this and other Searches can't return matches only from the people you Follow.

I don't know whether the Plazes integration with Twitter updates your profile-location. I'll have to give that a try. (Note also there's a Mobile Plazes site, and an IPhone app.)

It seems like they need some sort of tweet-prefix system like 2008-11-25-StockTwits.