My understanding is that all tweets will contain geo-location information: if the information was supplied when the tweet was created, that will be used; if no information was supplied, then the "default" location from the user's profile will be used.
I, too, have several comments and questions. 1. What if the location in a user's profile can't be geo-coded and no geo-location is provided when creating a tweet? I would hope that no geo-location is then provided in the tweet. 2. If it is possible to not have a geo-location attached to a tweet, e.g., because of the circumstances above, then I suggest that there be a parameter on the status/create method that suppresses copying the default geo-location to the tweet. In fact it should probably be the other way around, i.e., *DO* include the default location, for security reasons such as those mentioned by Lepton. I understand this will probably (significantly) reduce the number of tweets that are geo-coded, but I think this is appropriate given the sensitivity of the geo-location: I think users should have to "opt-in" on a tweet by tweet basis to have their tweets geo-located. 3. Will twitter be going back and geo-coding the locations given in existing twitter accounts? If so, will it be all at once as a batch, or the first time an old account is used to create a tweet with a geo-location, or something else? 4. Presumably an update of an account's location will cause that new location to be geo-coded. Will there be a delay in this, as we see with other updates to information in twitter, or will it be instantaneous, i.e., will the next tweet created for an account whose location is updated be guaranteed to contain the new location's geo-code? 5. I like the idea of levels of disclosure of geo-location information, but I dont think this can be practically implemented. Jim Renkel -----Original Message----- From: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com [mailto:twitter-development-t...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Lepton Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 08:50 To: Twitter Development Talk Subject: [twitter-dev] Re: if you will be using the Geolocation API ... My iPhone app ( http://myallo.com/hotlist currently waiting for Apple approval to go into the App Store) periodically wants to tell Twitter the user's location. If the user is in motion, and the app is open, as often as every 5 minutes. But it doesn't want to tweet it ("I'm here", "Now I'm here", "Now I'm here"). That would be... bad. So I'll still want to put it in the user profile. There are two other things. A question and a suggestion: Will every tweet include a location? My app is, most of the time, only interested in seeing a friend's location and most recent last tweet. It would be great if I could do this in one call (and greater if I could ask about several friends at once). If a user is only putting a location in the profile, will this location be sent along with each tweet? Locations have no security. It's the first, second, and third thing every single person wants to know about my app: "Who can see me, who can I see, what about stalkers?" PEople are very security oriented when it comes to location, rightly so. Currently with Twitter I work around this by having the app optionally post approximate coordinates. But a level of security would be great, and I think necessary to make geolocation successful and popular. For example take a look at brightkite.com. They have three levels of people: "The public", friends, and trusted friends. For each of those, you can set See my exact location, see only the city I'm in, or see nothing. That's really useful. For Twitter, it might be relatively easy to add a flag saying Only people I follow can see my location, and/or only followers can see my location. And/or you could have a list of users who could see my location. On Aug 31, 11:44 am, Raffi Krikorian <ra...@twitter.com> wrote: > part of our hopes when we designed the geolocation API is that people > can start putting their profile location (user.location) back to > something "useful" (e.g. mine could say "san francisco, ca") because > the specific location can be added as metadata to each tweet. > > what we're hoping for is that the user.location becomes something that > describes the user, and not the tweet. the geolocation API is for > describing the tweet. > do you have any suggestions as to what sorts of gotcha's we should > look out for?
