Twitter tells you what twits' where
And how to avoid them...
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Twitter, thrillingly, is adding location information to every tweet, so now you'll be able to avoid twits physically as well as electronically.
The service will be opt-in, and the accuracy of the location information will be dependent on the Twitter client used, so the new API is being shared with client developers before it hits the mainstream of the Twitter web and mobile sites.
The Twitter blog suggests you might like to pick up feeds from a specific locality - say where there's an earthquake happening, or a concert, or just what's happening locally. Certainly one can imagine a protest being coordinated in such a fashion: it's got to be more interesting that most of the minutiae-packed tweets carried by the service.
Picking up some form of location information isn't hard on most mobile platforms - even if GPS isn't available, projects such as OpenCellID provide some form of tracking, and at the very least the current country can be detected. The W3C's Geolocation API is spreading into browsers, so websites will soon be able to get a rough fix on your location - with all the usual caveats about privacy and opt-in requirements, obviously.
Getting the location out of an SMS is a lot more difficult, unless you're a network operator, so this announcement is also indicative of how far Twitter has come from the text-message-forwarding service it started out as. ®
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COMMENTS
I'm on the TRAIN!!.. YEAH.. ITS CR@P
Isn't tweeting the same as yelling down your mobile phone as loudly as you can?? I'm already waiting on the first break in where the tweeter has told the world exactly how far is from his house.
@Paul Hates Handles
That's what flash crowds are for. Get all the twankers together so that you up the kill rate.
But surely adding location info to the tweet will eat into those precious 140 characters? I guess it doesn't really matter since most tweeting is just narcissistic bollocks that can fit in 30 chars or less.
"41.556N,115.6W: Fuck I'm cool! Look at me!"
Huh?
Proxies? Spoofing? These are twitter users, ffs! I can see it now:
"Hmm, I want to tell people about the groaner I just passed, but I don't want them to know which crapper I'm on. Better use that proxy in Beijing..."
And on the receiving end:
"Hey, look! Joe took a crap in Paris, but is wiping up in Rome!"
Get Real. Nobody Cares.
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