Very cool, Ryan, Al3x et al!
I'm sure I'm but one of many devs that can't wait to get our hands on
this 8^)
mattpaul
mopimp productions
On Aug 20, 1:46 pm, Ryan Sarver rsar...@twitter.com wrote:
We wanted to give you all a heads up on a cool new feature that is coming
soon - Geolocation. The Geolocation API will give us the ability to attach
geographic metadata to tweets to provide additional context with your
update. Along with the option to tag updates, we will be able to search for
nearby tweets and view the geo metadata in user timelines. The additional
context allows for us to deliver more meaningful and localized experiences
to users. We are also really excited about a unique facet of this release in
that it will be API-only initially. This means that Twitter.com won't
surface the functionality and we look forward to seeing the new and
interesting experiences that will grow out of the ecosystem.
As part of our Geolocation efforts we will soon be publishing Geolocation
Best Pracitices to guide everyone through issues like security and privacy
as well as discussing some ideal experiences for users. Topics will include
things like storage of location data, what to do with a user's historical
data, how to present the concept of geotagging and more. The guide will
create a framework from which we can address the challenges that come about
when dealing with something as sensitive as someone's location while
hopefully allowing everyone enough creative freedom to create their own
experiences around it.
It is important to note that the feature is going to be *strictly
opt-in*. It will be disabled until a user chooses to switch it on. We
will provide a read-only attribute
geo_enabled on the user object so an app can detect if the user has it
disabled and let them know if they need to turn it on before using a
geolocation feature.
While we can't provide an exact date for launch, you should plan on having a
few weeks of development time before the new API is officially launched.
With that being said, lets get to it...
Example: Geotagging a Tweet
---
curl -d lat=37.780467long=-122.396762status=I have arrived -u user:pass
http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml;
?xml version=1.0 encoding=UTF-8?
status
created_atTue Apr 07 22:52:51 + 2009/created_at
...
*geo xmlns:georss=http://www.georss.org/georss;*
*georss:point37.780467** -122.396762**/georss:point*
*/geo*
user
id1401881/id
nameDoug Williams/name
...
*geo_enabledtrue/geo_enabled*
...
/user
/status
We have also updated the wiki to reflect what the API will look like when it
launches, so check it out and let us know if you have any
questions:http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-statuses%C2%A0u...http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-account%C2%A0ve...
We'll also be in our recently announced IRC channel (#twitterapi on
irc.freenode.net) if you want to discuss the announcement with the team.
Ryan
PM, Platform Teamhttp://twitter.com/rsarver