Location in Twitter

Monday, 8 June, 2009

Twitter, the micro-blogging website, has seen huge upsurge over the last year through it’s ease of use and adaptability to a variety of uses (see BakerTweet). However one area where it significantly lags behind is in location awareness. The usefulness of Twitter really came to the fore with #uksnow showing how crowd sourcing can produce some useful results (although not everyone agreed). There are plenty of examples of where this could be useful though (such as traffic congestion). But there is no location aspect to the Twitter API, replying on users to embed location information (postcode, town etc) All Points notes an article in Fortune detailing moves in this direction. It’s surprising given the popularity of both BrightKite and FireEagle. I guess there is more to come.

Add comment

Fill out the form below to add your own comments