Hi Peter,
The "search system" (are those air quotes?) does not do any parsing for lat/lon. Having said that nearly all geocoding services recognize the "lat,lon" format. Like google for example: http://bit.ly/gmap_lat_lon . I'm not sure if the prefix will cause any problems or not. If this is a mobile client I would give user the option to enable/disable updating the location and use the simple "lat,lon" version for the best compatibility with whatever comes down the road.
Thanks; — Matt Sanford / @mzsanford On Jan 9, 2009, at 02:54 AM, Peter Maurer wrote:
Hi list, a lot of mobile Twitter clients add the device's current geocode to the user's location, which results in location values like this one, for instance: "iPhone: 40.757929,-73.985506" Now, I'm tempted to do the same thing in the client I'm working on, but I'm wondering if doing it this way makes any sense. Here's what I found in an older (seemingly closed) thread on this list -- Matt said: "The location information in the search system is based on the users location at the time of the status. Because Twitter does not ask for structured location information at registration the free-text location is geocoded when entering the search system." -- So does the "search system" actually look for a geocode pattern in location fields, justifying the aforementioned "latitide,longitude" location updates? And if it does, are there any rules for this? Are prefixes (e.g., "iPhone:" -- see above) OK? Thanks! Cheers, Peter.
