mishmap

Twitter location mashups

Posted on March 31st, 2007 by Brian.
Categories: Uncategorized.

Like the rest of tech world, I’ve been racking my brain around killer Twitter apps if the company further opens up their API as rumored. Twitter allows you to send web or SMS (text message) snippets to your “profile” which can be tracked by your friends on the web or with their cell phones.

My understanding is that a Twitter powered web service has potential for ideas like this:

1. Techie with too much time on their hands compiles a list of radio stations in major cities.
2. Same Techie creates a Twitter profile named “radioWTF”
3. User (with less time on their hands) sends a text message to Twitter profile radioWTF, along with a city name. Since the prefix of “d” sends a direct message, it would look something like “d radioWTF Seattle”
4. While User was frustratingly trying to compose her cryptic message using her Razr’s T9 language support, Techie wrote a server side program to parse the city in the message (in this case, Seattle) and respond with the city’s radio call signs, descriptions and frequencies.
5. Techie’s program retrieves the message (this is the new part of the API), parses it and sends the message back.
6. User scans the received message, identifies the frequency of the shock jock talk show station she has been looking for, and sets her radio accordingly.

Where does location fit in? It turns out that there is already a clever hack used by the Twittervision Google Map mashup to plot people’s locations on a map. Location is specified by a prefix of “L:” so I can send Twitter a message like “L:77.5184, 161.5574 I’m watching penguins marching in Antarctica”. For the less geo-chic inclined, zip codes and city names can be used instead of latitude and longitude.

So here is how location can get interesting once Twitter opens up its API to enable web services:

1. A crafty techie might create a profile named “geolookup”, with an associated website (www.geolookup.com) as well.
2. A Twitter user can create a separate (non-Twitter) account on www.geolookup.com and submit their Twitter credentials.
3. They might select from a list of options - radio stations, weather, events tonight, coupons, etc, and also store their default location (eg. San Francisco).
4. They save their settings and later that evening send an SMS message to the geolookup Twitter user with zipcode 94114.
5. The geolookup web service looks up the user’s account, aggregates the requested information, and sends it back to the user who can make use of the information.

By using a website (in this case www.geolookup.com) to select the kind of information (weather, radio stations, events) that might later prove useful when mobile, a single Twitter message specifying a location (and implicitly time) can return a wealth of relevant information.

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