Twitter API to Offer Place-Based Location Support
While the Twitter API has long offered location support, that information always came in the form of longitude and latitude. Useful for a GPS, perhaps, but not so much for actual people who can't automatically translate coordinates into a real-world location in their heads.
Now the Twitter developers are promising support for "places," meaning a contextual location to match the longitude/latitude information. They give the following explanation for the proposed developments:
People, we find, inherently want to talk about a “place." A place, for a lot of people, has a name and is not a latitude and longitude pair. (37.78215, -122.40060), for example, doesn’t mean a lot to a lot of people — but, “San Francisco, CA, USA” does.
Presumably the result will be more specific than "San Francisco," but it's still unclear how well-defined these places will be. If I check in at a bar in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA, will Twitter locate me at the bar? Somewhere on the right street? Or just somewhere in Harvard Square?
That will depend in part on the accuracy of your phone's GPS and the depth of the database they're pulling contextual information from. If you just want to broadcast your location on Twitter, it still seems like Foursquare has the edge, with your ability to pick a specific place from a list of nearby locations.
Still, this might have some interesting and unexpected applications. As with any API update, we'll just have to wait to see what third-party developers start to do with it to see how useful it'll be.
Follow Technorati