A Challenge to the Location-Based Services Community

As you may know, Twitter is in the process of rolling out a new place-based location feature: Twitter�s Website Now Attaches Location to Tweets. Twitter announced the mechanics of the new service to the developer community on March 1, 2010: Developer Preview: upcoming geo features (a.k.a “A place is not just a latitude and a longitude – it has a name”). What you need to know:

What You Need to Know About Privacy

1. Location tagging of tweets is disabled by default! If you do nothing, your tweets will not be tagged with the place where you entered them!
2. If you do decide to enable location, Twitter will ask the browser to determine your location. I don’t know which other browsers have this capability, but I know Firefox does. How Firefox determines your location, and how to prevent that if you wish to do so, is documented here: Geolocation In Firefox.
3. If you later decide to purge the location information from your tweets, all you need to do is go into your Twitter account settings and click on the “Delete all location information” link. Twitter will delete all stored location information from your tweets.

As far as I know, the new place-based location tagging is not currently being added to the tweets coming out of Twitter Search. As of yesterday, 2010-03-10, this was the case. One other thing you should know: when you delete geotagging information from a tweet, Twitter sends a “geo-scrub” message to all services downstream of the Streaming API. This tells those services to delete the geotagging information from the tweet. It is, of course, up to them to do so.

Twitter API Geotagging Best Practices

Twitter has clearly documented best practices for members of the developer community like me. Here’s the link: Geotagging API Best Practices. I’m not going to repeat the whole document, but it’s clear that Twitter has paid serious attention to the potential for abuse and set a stake in the ground that I haven’t seen from other services. For example,

“Explain the value of Geolocation to users

“Users will have less interest in providing their current location if they are unaware of the value on the other side of the transaction. You as an app developer should always try to provide immediate value to incentivize the user to provide the information. This can come in various forms — showing nearby tweets, narrowing search based on the user’s location, promoting user discovery based on proximity to the user, etc.”

A Challenge to the Location-Based Services Community

1. As Twitter states, “Users will have less interest in providing their current location if they are unaware of the value on the other side of the transaction.” So my challenge to all of the vendors of location-based services is, “Show me the value!” What do I get from broadcasting to the world where I am? How does this solve a real problem for me?
2. What are your best practices for developers? How are you ensuring that your developer community honors them?
3. If you consume data from the Twitter Streaming API, are you honoring the “geo-scrub” messages and deleting location data from your databases?

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