Raffi, Most Excellent! But a couple of more questions / comments, of course....
1. "the user.location is a completely separate entity (for now)" implies that maybe sometime in the future it may be used, e.g., to provide a default geo-coded location for a tweet. I would suggest that if the user's profile location if ever geo-coded, that geo-code should be added to the <user> objects returned by API calls, at least the users/show method. Users will want to know what may be, e.g., added to their tweets without having to generate a test tweet to find out. 2. Having the user's profile location geo-coded and returned in API calls would be very useful now. Yeh, twitter client web-sites / applications can do it for themselves (Mine certainly will if twitter doesn't do it.), but may come up with different / inconsistent results. And, trust me, it ain't as easy to get good results as it might first appear. To maximize use and consistency, it would be great if twitter did the geo-coding and supplied it to everyone. 3. Will twitter client web-sites / applications be able to turn the geo-location feature on for their users, or do the users have to go to twitter.com with a browser to do this? My concern here is that twitter.com only supports two languages (English and Japanese) for its UI, where my site (http://twxlate.com) supports these and over 40 more. Unless the user is fluent in English or Japanese, they won't be able to turn it on. I've already run into similar problems as I'm rolling out test versions of OAuth support. As I've written some pretty spiffy geo-coding applications for other purposes, I plan on doing some pretty spiffy geo-coding stuff with twxlate.com. But it needs to be usable, or users won't use it and / or may be annoyed by it. I would hate for that to happen to what promises to be a really neat feature. Thanks in advance, Jim Renkel -----Original Message----- From: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com [mailto:twitter-development-t...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Raffi Krikorian Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2009 17:20 To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com Subject: [twitter-dev] Re: if you will be using the Geolocation API ... > 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. actually - if there is no data passed in via the Geolocation API (the "lat" and "long" parameters on the update), then the geo object in the response will be empty. the user.location is a completely separate entity (for now). > 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. if a valid latitude and longitude is not provided with the tweet, then no geo data will be returned with the tweet. the user, however, will still have his/her "location" as set in his/her settings page. > 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. by default, every twitter account will have access geolocation API turned _off_. moreover, the only way to turn it on is for the user to log into twitter's web site, go to his or her's settings page, and then toggle access on. if a user (or an application on behalf of the user) attempts to send geolocated information up to twitter along with the tweet, and geolocation is turned off, then the tweet will go through, but the geolocated information will be dropped and not stored. hope that helps! -- Raffi Krikorian Twitter Platform Team ra...@twitter.com | @raffi
