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Twitter Developing Location-Based API
adeelarshad82 writes "Twitter developers are now working on a location-based API that will provide accurate information on your whereabouts. Developers will be able to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. The option will definitely be opt-in. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice, and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time."
The tweets are coming from inside your house!
function TwitterAPIGetLocation(name) {
return name + ' is in front of a PC';
}
Doesn't twitter already support this? My girlfriend and I went to the grand canyon around a year ago...I remember her taking her iPhone out and showing me how there were also a bunch of other people there twittering. It came up with a map containing their userpic, and their tweet...
Was I hallucinating this? Is my girlfriend secretly a twitter developer!?
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I really cannot understand what everybody's interest in Twitter is. I've used it and read some posts and still cannot understand why it is so popular. Maybe I just "don't get it"?
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If only Twitter could stay online for more than an hour without the Fail Whale rearing its head.
Also if only Twitter could stop the bots from randomly adding people.
If only Twitter was actually good. Facebook is superior.
... because random strangers really need to know your physical whereabouts.
What need does this fulfill?
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
"...and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time."
*face palm* Once it's on the internet, it's going to stay there til the end of days. People with billions of dollars have hired armies of lawyers to try and scrub data off the internet. They haven't yet succeeded. Hell, entire countries have tried. And to prove it... bomb president 9/11 terrorist airplane communist republican from france sucking down molitav cocktails and banging gay senators. There. Archived for infinity.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I ditched Twitter ages ago in part because of its lack of location awareness, since that capability was offered by other services like Brightkite.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice, and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time.
Fat chance, me thinks. If this catches on, you can bet there will be 3rd party services that cache and index this location data indefinitely.
How long before burglars say "wow, previously we had to wait someone to tweet they're out of town and know their address. Now we can just look at their tweet history and see where they live and when they're out of town! Let's apply some Web 2.0 Datamining and..."
There are some things I think location-based services, now including Twitter, need to learn from previous experience of other location-based services like FireEagle:
1. Don't require me to use any specific technology to update it. I don't have a smartphone, and don't really want one either. I have an iPod touch and I have a mobile phone. I quite like them being separate (the fact that my phone lasts a few days on standby and isn't tied to any specific provider is pretty nice). That said, I do use location based technologies: I just use some interesting ways to update them. The primary way I update my location is using the /var/log/auth.log data on my Linux machine. Whenever I log in over SSH, my computer checks to see the domain I'm logging in from. I have a file on the computer that maps the IP addresses to real street addresses, and then notifies FireEagle, Yahoo's location brokerage service, which then appears in Facebook (and also lets me go to sites like pubs.iamnear.net and find out pubs that I am near). Decouple data collection from data use. My phone doesn't know where I am - it's a pretty dumb phone. But that doesn't mean none of the gadgets or technology I use don't.
2. History isn't that much of a problem, but live data is. I don't care that the whole world knows I was wandering around central London a few days ago. I don't mind my friends knowing where I am now (so long as I have some kind of prominent kill switch that cleanses the Internet of my current location). The problem is when everyone knows where I am right now. If someone knows that I'm some particular place, they know I'm not at home - which means they can burgle my home.
3. And, well, I don't want even my friends - or, rather Facebook/Twitter type friends - to know where I live unless I tell them. What location services that hook up to social networks need is a way to say "when I am near this address, don't tell anyone".
The privacy stuff is important, and I hope Twitter take it really slowly and listen to user and developer feedback. There is a good side to location services which too much focus on privacy ignores: they let you meet up with your friends. I posted on Twitter a while back that I was working in the British Library. Within minutes, a friend responded that so was he. So we had lunch. That's pretty cool. Allowing people who know each other online to serendipitously meet up IRL is a great thing, and we need to maximize it without enabling creepy stalkers.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
going to die the death that it so richly deserves?
I've opted out of twitter. I do not subscribe, I do not read. I wouldn't even know about it if I had a choice.
In a world obsessed by privacy otherwise, why would I want this -- unless I'm incapable of tweeting more than: I am here!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Brightkite already has a pretty decent, open location-based API, and it interfaces to twitter and facebook.
Can someone who knows about it explain what the difference between brightkite's localization and twitter's ?
Tell your friends about xenu.net
I'm not quite sure wtf I/my friends/my family/any creepy fucker online/joe random/internet-equipped chimp at NASA/anyone would want to know anyone's whereabouts or what they are doing every waking moment of the second. Twitter is a 21st century abomination in itself; too much hype for 160 characters, IMHO. I can think of plenty of the most boring piped together, reg-ex'ify'd *NIX commands that serve a better purpose than some Twitter posts in the same character count. I believe people in less fortunate/democratic countries fight for their right of privacy, but it seems like all the social networking flamers feel quite happy giving that up, and to silicon America, mind you, for doing the 'in-crowd' thing. I'm pretty damn proud of myself for *not* jumping a bandwagon such as this social networking toilet spin.
Twitter may implement irrelevant features such as location APIs but what about localization? Twitter desperately needs a way to filter tweets by country or even such basic stuff as supporting other languages besides english. When will twitter arrive to the early 90s world of software development?
Good, hopefully alot of people realize they no longer need to update everyone where they are at all times with tweets .... actually there was never a need.
This already exists, and it's called Loopt. Support for all major phones/carriers + web browser, links with twitter & facebook. What's the big deal here?
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Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
All those apps should make a stalker's job much easier. I mean, think about it. You stumble over some hottie's pic on the net, so you start checking her out. You've got her twitter nickname, her myspace nickname, and you've got her phone number, her high school, names and phone numbers of all her family and freinds. But, how do you figure out exactly where she IS?
Technology is great, isn't it?
Excuse, me, gotta get back to my stalking.....
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
whatcouldpossiblygowrong
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
Can they add a URL a la tinyurl.com/bit.ly/etc instead/as an option?
Ken
Osama Bin Laden will tweet his Jihad message to all the sleeper cells, but forget to turn off the locator and then the military sends missiles to the exact spot he is standing only to find he was in New Jersey the whole time but left an hour before the missile strike. If that happened, Twitter would finally have a purpose.
I get the feeling that the script wizards who come up with this crap were never exposed to the old post war science fiction movies or books. We're going to code our own prison around us, and in many ways we already have. Just because we can do something, doesn't mean we should do it. We need to exercise some common sense. This is a bunch of expensive lawsuits and criminal investigations waiting to happen. "No Judge, I couldn't have been at the scene of the crime. I have twitter proof that I was at home watching Star Trek!"
Opt-in has to be seen in context. If you are not in control of providing the data, opt-in is a dangerous illusion.
If you have a local application which supplies data to a system you could potentially chose what information you provide (we're assuming here for a moment that the app doesn't lie to you and just flags the opted out data as "opted out" instead). In that case, only your point of origin (your IP address) also contains a degree of location information.
If, however, it's not *you* who provides location data you're out of luck. They can do what they want, and in the current ethical climate it means they'll take your data but won't tell you about it. If you're lucky you'll discover it because they use the data but you'll never be sure.
Insert
ÜberTwitter has been doing that for awhile now, probably since the first release. I've been using it on my BlackBerry Bold for quite some time now, and it works great!