Twitter gets serious about location
By Dave Jeyes
Twitter applications have long been using a work-around to update users’ location on the service. Now developers are getting a sneak peek at Twitter’s new location API as the company catches up with its community.
Developers are getting the first look at Twitter’s new location API so that they can roll it into their applications before the feature goes live to users. Then it will be rolled out to users, who will actually have to opt into this location-sharing feature.
This is a fairly standard way of putting the minimum possible amount of security around location-sharing. Users are turning the feature on in their Twitter clients, but opting in gives Twitter a chance to warn users about the risks of sharing your location openly on the Internet.
Until now, developers have been updating users’ profile location to signify where they’re tweeting from. This approach has a few downfalls.
That’s like saying that your home town is wherever your last tweet was. It’s not really accurate although it’s become standard practice on the service. Twitter clients are also updating users’ locations in latitude and longitude meaning that other users can’t read it.
Lastly, the Twitter profile location means that there isn’t location data associated with each update. Once a user sends a new update, the location of their last tweet isn’t kept in their history.
The new Twitter location API will vastly increase the amount of location-based data that Twitter stores. It will make it much more interesting to plot tweets on a map and see what is going on around any location.
It’s great that Twitter is finally focusing on better location-based services for its users. What may be more interesting is how many developers and users took advantage of the old workaround to share their location with friends.
For year, companies have been trying to find ways to get users to update and share their location with friends. Twitter is quickly becoming the dominant way to do so and it wasn’t even the company’s goal until now.
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