Sunday, December 06, 2009

How to publish geo information to Twitter

Mashup Twitter location lets you publish geo-related information to Twitter. It is not about geo tagging in Twitter. Actually users do not need to geo-enable their accounts. Twitter location is just a way for publish messages (statuses) with some geo-related data. Click on the map and mashup will prepare for you a link to appropriate Google Map.
The goal is very clean – simplify Twitter publishing for messages (statuses) where location info (place) is important.
Mashup does not request any authorization, the actual publishing will be performed via the standard Twitter client.

You can pass the following optional parameters to the basic URL:

lat - an initial latitude (where to show the map)
lng - an initial longitude
zml - an initial zoom level
t - a message that will be added to any published status


For example, suppose we are creating some information system that collects information for discounts. We can choose a hash tag #discount and use the following URL for publishing locations with discounts:

http://twitloc.linkstore.ru?t=%23discount

(%23 – is just encoded #).

Etc.

A reference to the map will be published in the standard format that allows an easy extraction for geo data. For example:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=55.8783053 37.4362134

So if our information system programmatically collects all statuses with hash #discount we can easily extract latitude/longitude pair from the each message. Ant then show them on the map, display "nearest data" in mobile mashups etc.

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