On the verge of rolling out its new geolocation feature, Twitter is thinking ahead. One potentially powerful use for it will be to showcase trending topics happening in specific places. The overall Trending Topic area has long been getting out of control with spam (which Twitter is now working to clean up), but location-specific trends could be very interesting. And Twitter clearly knows this as it has announced a new feature for third-party developers to use: Trends API.
In a post on its API announcement Google Group, Platform team member Raffi Krikorian writes that at least at first, this will only be open to specific locations in the world. For example, he cites San Francisco and London as two potential places that will be serviced by this. São Paulo is another mentioned in a tweet. Krikorian also notes that:
At a high level, there will be two new endpoints:
- an endpoint to give a listing of all locations that trends are
available for, and- an endpoint to actually allow you to query by a specific location.
Twitter is using Yahoo’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to tag the locations they have information for. Doing so gives them a way to use IDs rather than language-specific names for places. More on Yahoo’s GeoPlanet (which this is a part of) here.
It would also seem that at first these trends will only be available for real-time data. That is to say that there will not be daily and weekly data for location-based trends, Krikorian notes. (Twitter showcases these on its main page.) He goes on to say that may come in the future.
First!
This is an amazing implementation for Twitter. Even more so, think about the possible highly targeted advertising that may be brought on by this geolocation feature!
Maybe Twitter is on its way to find a method to generate revenue.
I’ve noticed the Twitter posts get less and less and less comments every day.
Just thought you should know.
That’s because there is an overflow of Twitter news within the blogosphere.
Sure, it gets repetitive, but it is still nice to learn about these things.
Seems like the Twitter team is on a roll with pushing out new features to enhance Twitter.
I would love to see settings to influence the type of information that shows up on your feed. For example: the ability to hide tweets from a certain list/group of people, and then having a notification appear by the list name to notify users that there are unread tweets… or something of that nature.
It’s always easy to shit on twitter but I think it’s interesting to think of twitters as an experiment in a collective social consciousness. It’s like the brain: from the billions of independent but interconnected neurons relaying simple messages to each other somehow arises human consciousness. Twitter similarly allows the rapid dissemination of simple messages across a wide network through retweets.
Of course the brain has the advantage in terms of numbers (100 billion neurons vs millions of users; 7000 synapses per neuron vs dozens of friends per user). Twitter has the advantage, however, with the content of its messages, and as the article notes, that content keeps getting richer by the day. Maybe one day we’ll reach a parity point where the info content of the twitter messages outweigh the number advantage of the brain, and twitter will reach some sort of skynet-like consciousness. As is, twitter is already something like the zeitgeist of the digital domain.
Geolocation will be huge for Twitter.
I envisioned Twitter as a tool that enables real-times news to disseminate quickly. Yes yes I know that’s how it is now but I imagine and earthquake in SF and with push notifications, SMS, geolocation and more would make an excellent system to get news out quickly of exit routes, shelters and more.
Most cities that have these kind of alert systems always fall short. Geolocation brings us one step closer to that kind of system powered by Twitter.
Sarver couldn’t have put it better. This IS going to be AWESOME!!!!!!
well i don’t think he was talking about this, but maybe, who knows
you can check out a local cloud for topics here: http://bit.ly/8aG5x
Just click on the map
http://Insttant.com already does this. (they were at TechCrunch50 company)
dont think that’s the same at all.
Hope NOT use the manual location option because some people use Cali instead of California or the moon, hell and other prolific imagination words.
Nixle already does this and much better. Twitter is only good for informal person to person communications. It is not identity-certified. A new service, NIXLE (www.nixle.com), which is “replacing Twitter and Facebook” (NBC, 11alive.com), has found a niche where Twitter hasn’t. And Nixle is already Mobile nationwide, unlike Twitter.
Nixle offers social networking on a secure, authenticated platform. Anyone, even your mom, can create a fake Twitter account. Nixle is identity-certified through NLETS (http://en.wikip....org/wiki/NLETS), the most secure communication service around.
Nixle allows public safety agencies to communicate directly with local residents over cell phone, email, and the web. The information is delivered in real time to geographically targeted consumers. And it’s free.
I like this development although I expect that it will be open to manipulation and exploits..
Wow twitter that’s awes…hey, wait a second:
http://trendsmap.com/.
Is Twitter going to spend the next year reinvesting the tools that already run off of their API?
key difference is that this will be using the twitter geodata on a per tweet basis rather than location data from profiles. so if i say i’m from san fran but am in LA for something, this is a better solution.
Twitter’s location based trends will be great, already started working on adding this feature to iTrends iPhone app.
really cool feature!
As MG Siegler laid out, this is awesome on both sides of the equation – for producing Tweets that more accurately represent a user’s location and also for listening to and finding tweets that are about events around you that are gaining steam.
Putting Lists and work on culling out spam aside for a second, the location and geo-tagging innovations could singularly solidify a long-term leadership role for Twitter as driver of the statusphere.
I can’t wait to get this capability integrated into CloudProfile and to also see what other tools do to leverage it!
At twillage.com, we also use yahoo WOEIDs to plot events by monitoring twitter’s public stream using the track API (e.g. conferences, meetups, festivals, happy hours, etc.). I’m glad Twitter itself is also using WOEIDs so will be able to also use their APIs to plot even more events.
This sounds identical to http://BubbleNoise.com. I launched this last year to capture location based real-time updates.
The stream is independent of twitter, and uses geolocating to figure out where the entries are coming from. It’s live, so MG I’d love to chat about it. hit me up.
oh, I wonder when that MyLocator-freaktard will come around
http://tremors.rummble.com …that’s all