As we first reported last night, Twitter appeared to have turned on at least part of its new Geolocation API. Today, the company has confirmed the roll out on its API Announcement Google Group page.
As Twitter API team member Raffi Krikorian writes today, “as some of you may have already noticed, we’ve started going through the first steps to get the geolocation API out our door.” Last night, a portion of the Geoloction API got turned on and it slightly borked the new, still unreleased version of Tweetie. Basically, it looks like it turned on geolocation coordinates for all tweets, even if they weren’t meant to be enabled. This gave every tweet a coordinate of 0,0, which put them in middle of the ocean off the coast of Africa.
Tweetie developer Loren Brichter quickly realized what the issue was and corrected it. Other third-party developers we talked to noticed similar things. As such, Krikorian explains a bit more about how the Geolocation API will work today. As he writes:
if you start to pull status objects through the API, you’ll notice that, for the majority of them, there is an empty <geo/> tag and for the user objects there is a <geo_enabled> tag that is set to false.
And he continues:
for clarification: the <geo_enabled> will always be in a user object reflecting whether the user has opted-into the geolocation API. Â there will also always be a <geo> tag in the status object regardless of whether there is a location attached to the tweet or not. Â if there is no location, then the tag will be empty. Â if there is a location (as above [here]), then the tag will be populated.
So it would appear that some of these apps weren’t taking the <geo_enabled> tag into account, and it may have been automatically setting it to ‘true’ which would then populate the <geo> tag with the 0,0 coordinates, since there was no actual geolocation data to share.
But, to be clear, the <geo> tag will always be there whether <geo_enabled> is set to ‘true’ or ‘false’, but if it’s ‘false’, it won’t be store any data and will self-close, I’m told.
Krikorian suggests that there have been some slight last-minute tweaks to the Geolocation API and that these are still in internal testing, but that they will be turning it on for a general audience “soon.”
geo locationz ftw!
That’s great. Wasn’t west Africa the birthplace of humanity anyway?
Unfortunately, you can’t enable geolocation in your profile yet, which must be done on the twitter site (no api for 3rd parties), or it won’t be of any use. Here is a list of 8 other issues with the geolocation api: http://bit.ly/kCv44
I need this in my life for when I end up on a random nights accompanied by alcohol. If I send out tweets at least I will know where I have been. Instead of hearing from people that they saw me outside a Church!
Bring on the trumpets that’s all I have to say…
that’a a great use-case. that would help me many a night.
Yeah it’ll be nice to see where you’ve been but so will girlfriends, bosses etc. I can see this as just as bad if not worse than posting pictures of yourself at a party on facebook and then calling in sick to work the next day. I know it can be turned off at twitter.com but when your out and had a few drinks you might forget to turn it off.
nice one.
Twitter KNOWS where you are…Twitter KNOWS what you are doing…and it wants you to TAKE THE QUIZ: WHICH JONAS BROTHER ARE YOU? $$$ So sad, Brtiney naked
MG Siegler, your posts have become such horrible dribble, grasping at whatever trifle occurene happens on this planet to make a blog post. You need to give us an apology, the readers.
Actually Twitter has been including users’ locations in their feeds for a while already… and I’ve been doing heatmaps of twitter usage (in Japan) for weeks!
Search for “tokyo heatmap twitter” on youtube
(i can’t post any URL here? that’s my 3rd try)
They have never included a location per tweet though. The location you see is the one defined in the user’s profile. The new API allows users to see where a tweet originated from.
So when I tweet to the world that I’m sitting on the toilet, the world will know it’s true.
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Hmmm. I don’t get why they’re (seemingly arbitrarily and incorrectly) using the GeoRSS namespace.
This is great! I love to read the local twitter stream on my iPhone Twitteriffic app.
Pretty slick spamming here, congrats (click link on name)
Will this work for Twitter using it on their mobile phones?
I do *not* want my location broadcast to the entire world, even opt-in. What is this, the “burgle my home” service?
Erm that’s why it’s opt-in only… if you, like I don’t like to broadcast a ‘please burgle me message’ then don’t opt in… simples.
If you don’t opt-in AND you don’t update your GPS location in your Twitter app then Twitter will never receive your latitude and longitude for that tweet.
So, I’m not allowed to do this by you? Even if I want to do it?
That makes sense.