Saturday, August 22, 2009

Twitter will soon know where you are

 This week Twitter announced that the service will soon get a new feature in its API: the capability to optionally put geolocation data into tweets.    Currently, geo-focused apps must hack location data into updates by linking them to Web pages, or updating the user's profile with their current location. Once Twitter lets developers embed geo into tweets themselves, a new and interesting world for developers will likely open up.     Another change this move may presage is an expansion of information that Twitter stores with tweets. Obvious items that developers could go to town with in an expanded Twitter API include conversational and retweet data (which Twitter is already working on), and of course embedded URLs. Twitter could, arguably, let developers put links directly into Tweets without relying on fragile third-party URL shorteners.
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August 22, 2009
Twitter API getting location data

This week Twitter announced that the service will soon get a new feature in its API: the capability to optionally put geolocation data into tweets.

Currently, geo-focused apps must hack location data into updates by linking them to Web pages, or updating the user's profile with their current location. Once Twitter lets developers embed geo into tweets themselves, a new and interesting world for developers will likely open up.

Another change this move may presage is an expansion of information that Twitter stores with tweets. Obvious items that developers could go to town with in an expanded Twitter API include conversational and retweet data (which Twitter is already working on), and of course embedded URLs. Twitter could, arguably, let developers put links directly into Tweets without relying on fragile third-party URL shorteners.


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 Also: Twitter pro accounts coming by year's end
Rafe Needleman
Rafe Needleman
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