Hi everyone. I've been working on a twitter app with a small team for about half a year now that is focused on geocoding and mapping of tweets. Work so far has been done with dummy data, since the geocoding APIs aren't available yet. I've been looking at how I might use the upcoming APIs to access real twitter geo data, but it doesn't seem possible to get the data that we need.
Right now in our test application we have a database of fake tweets that include lat/lon coordinates. This allows us to do queries for specific regions, periods of time, etc. For example, we need to know how many tweets were made within a certain rectangular area (someone's mobile screen) within the last hour, week etc. Right now I can get all of the tweets in one query, and then perform clustering to display them on a map. I cannot see anything in the upcoming APIs that allows me access to this sort of data. I've looked at http://search.twitter.com/search.json?geocode=40.757929%2C-73.985506%2C25km, but that only gives tweets within a certain radius, and only up to 100 at a time. This isn't practical when I need to identify on a map where perhaps thousands of tweets have happened over an extended time period. I've looked elsewhere and can't see anything that would help our situation, save the firehose. I know it says don't contact twitter about access, they'll contact you, but there is no way to launch our app without access to it. I would love to hear any suggestions people might have as to how I could perform the queries I need to perform, or perhaps alternative techniques I have neglected to think of. Thanks, Kallin Nagelberg
