14 DAY TRIAL // Location-based services are one of the newer web trends, along with the real-time web, but, while real time gets more hype, location may actually prove to be more important and practical in the long term. With the spread of mobile devices, phones, netbooks, laptops, the works, location is becoming increasingly important. Twitter had announced that it’s working to integrate geolocation into its service and has now finally confirmed that the feature is live for developers.
“As some of you may have already noticed, we've started going through the first steps to get the geolocation API out our door. there are a few more steps in the process that i want to share with all of you,” Raffi Krikorian from Twitter's Platform team wrote in the Twitter API Google Groups message board. “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.”
The announcement came after the feature was spotted in a private build of the upcoming Tweetie 2 iPhone Twitter client as well as by other developers. Despite no announcements from the microblogging services, users started noticing that the tweets now had coordinates associated with them. The problem was that most tweets showed up as having been sent from lat/long 0,0 which, as Twitter later clarified, was a mishap on the part of the developers, partly the fault of the vague API documentation.
Apparently all tweets will have the <geo> tag regardless of whether they actually have geolocation information associated with them. If they don't have the data then the <geo_enabled> tag will be set to false and developers can ignore the feature for that tweet. Geolocation was announced in late August and was supposed to be available to developers last week. Certain issues have pushed back the date a bit, but the feature is now live for internal testing and Twitter says it should become live for all developers soon.