Twitter Location Enhancements
A recent update to the Twitter API Announcement group identified some specifics on how location will be easier to apply to user’s status updates – enabling Twitter to better play the in social-location space popularized by services like Foursquare and Gowalla. This will be a fun development to follow, will help improve the platform we created to drive sites like the local-oriented STL Tweets.
Twitter’s focus on a rich API allows for a wide range of clients, apps, and connections, ensuring their audience participates from as many points possible. Their continued web service enhancement further establishes Twitter as a platform to adapt and extend, and improved location support encourages better local information sharing.
Location Context
Originally, only a profile setting existed to declare your location, but that granularity is limited to cities (assuming your entry is recognized), and one cannot necessarily attribute location to each post. Twitter followed up with latitude and longitude support for an individual tweet, but this is only available through API-driven clients when combined with a device supporting GPS (mostly phones). To the common user, it’s an ignored feature, and from our consumption of Twitter data, we can observe only a small fraction take advantage. This may be partly due to privacy concerns and awareness; by default, support for this feature is off on your user profile.
The API announcement identifies four significant changes:
Additional location detail in tweets
Tweets may now include expanded place details – not just coordinates, but also a place with a unique ID, a name, type of granularity, and specific coordinates defining the region on a map. The resolution of a place can be a city or neighborhood, allowing a new level of information precision.
Reverse geocoding
Send Twitter latitude and longitude, receive a list of places at multiple granularities; neighborhood and city supported. This is most equivalent to a check-in on other location services and where the user experience will improve – now clients can lookup where the user is, and provide a short list of recognized place names for selection, along with the system ID.
Get location details
With a provided ID, we can now get place name details, map coordinates for the bounding box, and even details for rendering its shape on a map. This service will certainly get attention to drive more map visualizations of Twitter activity. As location becomes further refined, I expect more types of data to be available similar to other location services, like recent updates and place details.
Status updates with place ID
Instead of latitude and longitude, location-aware clients will be able to send the user-selected place for their updated status, giving them control over the granularity of location shared, easing privacy concerns.
Addressing competition
I’ve shared my location across several services in the past few years, namely Plazes, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, Google’s Latitude; and the recent popularity contest is between Foursquare, Gowalla, and Yelp. The most compelling service for me has been Yelp, since there is additional value in the place relevant to my participation: the business review; the other services are more novelty. Even when I rationalize limiting my participation to a single service, I’m not actively keeping up with this engagement -the benefit is little more than bragging rights. (I’ll still be sad if I’m no longer mayor of Pappy’s Smokehouse)
With its massive user-base, Twitter introducing new features to location identification will provide increased audience awareness in, and accessibility to location-specific status. I expect to see this quickly adopted for use on mobile clients, but also anticipate the Twitter website will support place-selection for each tweet, removing the GPS requirement, but perhaps using network location help load the list. Additionally, now they’ll have the framework to expand location to the granularity of a single building and address – I hope this is the basis for allowing cross-service communication, so my continued participation on Twitter may connect my behavior to other location sites. Maybe the novelty of the other services is still interesting when I can be lazy about it.
Behavior migration
Twitter began by asking “What are you doing?”, perhaps playing on narcissistic attitudes, but also the desire to share activity with well-connected friends. They revised their question to “What’s happening?” as we recognized its potential as a news and attitude sharing medium as much as it was about getting friends together. With finer support for location, will we start considering status updates a check-in like other location services, or will location’s optional inclusion just extend how we use Twitter? Either way, I’m looking forward to learning more at the local level.
