Well I have Lon/lat data for all (not just major, all) US ans CA cities so converting the location name to Lon/lat data is somehing I can do in house. I can even do my own radius calculations no sweat. I just am having trouble determining how I go about filtering out the garbage in the location field and finding actual usable city/state info.
Knowing how Twitter does it sure would help! I wonder if they are using IP location info in their determination... On Mar 5, 3:51 pm, "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <zzn...@gmail.com> wrote: > Quoting Mark McBride <mmcbr...@twitter.com>: > > > Parsing the location field is probably your best bet, but I'd say you have a > > challenging road ahead. It is indeed a mess, but there are geocoding > > solutions available to try and sort this stuff out. > > Be *very* careful with "geocoding solutions", especially taking note > of the terms of service and licensing constraints. Google, Yahoo and > Microsoft all have restrictions on what you can do with their tools. > There are some open source / "free as in freedom" tools too, but they > may be more limited. > > I've spent a number of hours recently working with various open source > projects associated with mapping earthquake and other disaster zones, > and this is a constant source of frustration. I'm guessing it would be > even more a source of frustration if you're building marketing / sales > tools rather than non-profit ones. People trapped in the rubble of a > collapsed build usually *want* to be found; people sitting in a > restaurant having a glass of wine with some friends might not. ;-) > > -- > M. Edward (Ed) Borasky > borasky-research.net/m-edward-ed-borasky/ > > "A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." ~ Paul Erdos
