From my garnered understanding - It uses a two stage process - the
first time you define a space (either via Facebook App
http://apps.facebook.com/twittervision , in a Tweet or on the
Twittervision.com or Twittermaps.com sites) you specify the actual
geocodable location first like L:Mojo=5 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New
Zealand: (note end colon) and the bot or the Ether saves that for your
user id. From then on you can specify L:Mojo and it will plot you at
that location. You don't need a trailing colon for simple names as
long as the stuff after is not going to be parsed as an address.
Twittervision seems to be broken for FB app and site for me at the
moment at the moment - but a new beta is out - David Troy is the guy
behind it, I've been meaning to have a chat with him. There is some
API info.
I currently have ~40 locations saved in twittervision - things like
L:home and L:bed, L:dairy, L:kindy L:Syn Bar L:comms (L:work wouldn't
update when I changed jobs) I just added one now ..but it doesn't seem
to add new locations anymore - can only use old ones. eg L:Wellington
I was planning to peruse the API and see if I could suck out my data
and make it portable...
eg:
L:SX=The Southern Cross Bar and Restaurant, 35 Abel Smith St,
Wellington, New Zealand: -- see how the first part is a full name,
then the address.. ?
I also tend to use "heading|headed to L:location" or similar to
indicate i'm in transit from the last location to new one. In an
unconnected world - still is useful
So I welcome our new geocoding masters... keen to collaborate, and
integrate with the likes of zoomin.co.nz places or google apis,
Firebird, Britekite, LOKI etc.
I'd seen L: tags, didn't know where they came from. Were there any
features in particular you enjoyed from twittervision in terms of
analyzing / sharing the data that you generated from twittervision?
Ben
On Jun 21, 5:03 pm, JoMangee <jo-goo...@mangee.net.nz> wrote:
> From my garnered understanding - It uses a two stage process - the
> first time you define a space (either via Facebook Apphttp://apps.facebook.com/twittervision, in a Tweet or on the
> Twittervision.com or Twittermaps.com sites) you specify the actual
> geocodable location first like L:Mojo=5 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New
> Zealand: (note end colon) and the bot or the Ether saves that for your
> user id. From then on you can specify L:Mojo and it will plot you at
> that location. You don't need a trailing colon for simple names as
> long as the stuff after is not going to be parsed as an address.
> Twittervision seems to be broken for FB app and site for me at the
> moment at the moment - but a new beta is out - David Troy is the guy
> behind it, I've been meaning to have a chat with him. There is some
> API info.
> I currently have ~40 locations saved in twittervision - things like
> L:home and L:bed, L:dairy, L:kindy L:Syn Bar L:comms (L:work wouldn't
> update when I changed jobs) I just added one now ..but it doesn't seem
> to add new locations anymore - can only use old ones. eg L:Wellington
> I was planning to peruse the API and see if I could suck out my data
> and make it portable...
> eg:
> L:SX=The Southern Cross Bar and Restaurant, 35 Abel Smith St,
> Wellington, New Zealand: -- see how the first part is a full name,
> then the address.. ?
> I also tend to use "heading|headed to L:location" or similar to
> indicate i'm in transit from the last location to new one. In an
> unconnected world - still is useful
> So I welcome our new geocoding masters... keen to collaborate, and
> integrate with the likes of zoomin.co.nz places or google apis,
> Firebird, Britekite, LOKI etc.
I have some thoughts on what features I've been looking for/to build as
regards to addresses in twitter et al below.
But first off let me also plus one the use of the "L:" format for addresses
in twitter. I'm not in love with it, but well:
- When I looked into this a few months ago I was under the impression it
was already the defacto standard.
- "$" is already used by http://stocktwits.com/ as a symbol to indicate
stock tickers - eg http://stocktwits.com/u/spiderhay/2262257078
Also worth nothing that twittervision and twittermap don't actually 'work'
very well, far as I can tell. For instance I laughed to see @JoMangee,
conscientious L: tagger showing up in Uttar Pradesh on twittervision just
now http://twitpic.com/830dm.
As for myself I can't seem to convince 'it' that I am *not* in the mid west
US.
So.. perhaps an oppotunity for someone to do this stuff right?
Twitterplaces.com is certainly a good url to do this from.
--
Here is what I, persoonally would be looking for in a twitter related
address service, regardless of how the address is tagged.
I've recently been building an app that needs to parse addresses out of
twitter feeds and basically here is what I've thinking I would have to do
myself - however if I can offload this to a service that specializes in this
stuff then all the better. Just like I am very glad to offload definitive
url making to bit.ly and its API I'd be very keen to offload the address
stuff to, say, twitterplaces.com.
In address parsing basically what I want is:
1. something easy for users to type and read as if they were speaking
(relatively) normally
2. format as short as can be
3. something to geocode the above
4. a hook to get other meta data (such as aliases, address, locality, town,
region, country data, where possible) and possibly a 'definitive' url for
all mentions of that address/ or addresses nearby etc..
--
I've gotten reasonably far with the above by just throwing the text after
the L: at the GoogleMaps Geocoder service. (eg
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/geocoding-ext...)
however encountered the following issues, which I am yet to work
around. I
guess these constitute a wish list of features I would like to see from an
ideal twitterplaces type service..
- I would like to support that you can do the L:home=44 mystreet,wellington
shorthand, so folks can save space on future tweets. That is 'shorthand'
names within the namespace of each twitter user. However, this becomes a
problem because:
1. it means keeping track of *all* mentions of L:xyz= for that twitter
user, right back in time, even when they haven't tagged it for my attention
(ideally).
2. the twittermap.com api is supposed to let me look these up but i
don't trust it, see above.
- To get the best results from the Google maps API parser, you of course
want to pass it the correct 'hints' so that, for instance "L:belgrade" when
coming from an IP in Maine is interpreted as the town in the US versus an
address in the Balkans. This works great when I call the API via Javascript
but calling it serverside, I need to find a way to pass through the right
'hints' to Google - which of course need to be the hints that belong to that
particular user. An obvious compromize would be to use the address defined
for the twitter username, and pass that as a hint.
- sometimes, it would be nice if my users could absolutely positively, let
someone know exactly they are , using the full geocode (as picked off a
'mapPicker') eg.. "going down to the local L:park=(-36.884109,174.770416)
for outdoor chess, see you there" or something. Using the full code is all
very well but takes up stacks of space in twitter. What I've idly wondered
thought would be really cool is if they could let them a single Unicode tag
(appropriately watermarked / noise safe encoded) so that the code can be
recognized. That way folks could then post something like "going down to
L:my local for coffee #粂". That is, kinda like a little 'web bug' at the end
of the message for 'tagging' the address within. Obviously this is inspired
by the cool 'twitter compression' done here..
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-encoding-chal...
--
There are two things I'd like to actually do for my end users with the
addresses mentioned in their twitter messages:
1. show them on a map (well, du'h)
2. let them filter messages by a faceted hierachy, so eg they click NZ, then
get a list of regions mentioned within NZ, then click say Wellington, then
get a list of local towns mentioned that are both in wellington and NZ. That
is, a faceted browse based on locations mentioned.
--
Finally, of course I'd be keen to be able to send and receive data via JSON.
Be happy to sign up to use the API via a server side API key etc (for rate
limiting/enforcement of service etc) and stats and such are always good!
In return I'd be more than happy to provide links back to, say
twitterplaces.com from any tweets that I would show on the site etc.
--
Ben, seems to me there is definitely an opportunity for someone to create
the 'bit.ly' of twitter addresses here. Twittermap got in their first but
they screwed it up, just like tinyurl.com
On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:51 AM, benn <bno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd seen L: tags, didn't know where they came from. Were there any
> features in particular you enjoyed from twittervision in terms of
> analyzing / sharing the data that you generated from twittervision?
> Ben
> On Jun 21, 5:03 pm, JoMangee <jo-goo...@mangee.net.nz> wrote:
> > I have used the L: format for some time - pioneered by
> > twittervision.com (seehttp://
> twitter.com/twittervisionandhttp://newzealand.twittervision.com/) My feed
> is athttp://twittervision.com/JoMangee > > - but due to API limits etc - it doesn't update well. It used to use
> > the Jabber feed AFAIK.
> > From my garnered understanding - It uses a two stage process - the
> > first time you define a space (either via Facebook Apphttp://
> apps.facebook.com/twittervision, in a Tweet or on the
> > Twittervision.com or Twittermaps.com sites) you specify the actual
> > geocodable location first like L:Mojo=5 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New
> > Zealand: (note end colon) and the bot or the Ether saves that for your
> > user id. From then on you can specify L:Mojo and it will plot you at
> > that location. You don't need a trailing colon for simple names as
> > long as the stuff after is not going to be parsed as an address.
> > Twittervision seems to be broken for FB app and site for me at the
> > moment at the moment - but a new beta is out - David Troy is the guy
> > behind it, I've been meaning to have a chat with him. There is some
> > API info.
> > I currently have ~40 locations saved in twittervision - things like
> > L:home and L:bed, L:dairy, L:kindy L:Syn Bar L:comms (L:work wouldn't
> > update when I changed jobs) I just added one now ..but it doesn't seem
> > to add new locations anymore - can only use old ones. eg L:Wellington
> > I was planning to peruse the API and see if I could suck out my data
> > and make it portable...
> > eg:
> > L:SX=The Southern Cross Bar and Restaurant, 35 Abel Smith St,
> > Wellington, New Zealand: -- see how the first part is a full name,
> > then the address.. ?
> > I also tend to use "heading|headed to L:location" or similar to
> > indicate i'm in transit from the last location to new one. In an
> > unconnected world - still is useful
> > So I welcome our new geocoding masters... keen to collaborate, and
> > integrate with the likes of zoomin.co.nz places or google apis,
> > Firebird, Britekite, LOKI etc.
> I have some thoughts on what features I've been looking for/to build as
> regards to addresses in twitter et al below.
> But first off let me also plus one the use of the "L:" format for addresses
> in twitter. I'm not in love with it, but well:
> - When I looked into this a few months ago I was under the impression it
> was already the defacto standard.
> - "$" is already used byhttp://stocktwits.com/as a symbol to indicate
> stock tickers - eghttp://stocktwits.com/u/spiderhay/2262257078
> Also worth nothing that twittervision and twittermap don't actually 'work'
> very well, far as I can tell. For instance I laughed to see @JoMangee,
> conscientious L: tagger showing up in Uttar Pradesh on twittervision just
> nowhttp://twitpic.com/830dm.
> As for myself I can't seem to convince 'it' that I am *not* in the mid west
> US.
> So.. perhaps an oppotunity for someone to do this stuff right?
> Twitterplaces.com is certainly a good url to do this from.
> --
> Here is what I, persoonally would be looking for in a twitter related
> address service, regardless of how the address is tagged.
> I've recently been building an app that needs to parse addresses out of
> twitter feeds and basically here is what I've thinking I would have to do
> myself - however if I can offload this to a service that specializes in this
> stuff then all the better. Just like I am very glad to offload definitive
> url making to bit.ly and its API I'd be very keen to offload the address
> stuff to, say, twitterplaces.com.
> In address parsing basically what I want is:
> 1. something easy for users to type and read as if they were speaking
> (relatively) normally
> 2. format as short as can be
> 3. something to geocode the above
> 4. a hook to get other meta data (such as aliases, address, locality, town,
> region, country data, where possible) and possibly a 'definitive' url for
> all mentions of that address/ or addresses nearby etc..
> --
> I've gotten reasonably far with the above by just throwing the text after
> the L: at the GoogleMaps Geocoder service. (eghttp://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/geocoding-ext...)
> however encountered the following issues, which I am yet to work
> around. I
> guess these constitute a wish list of features I would like to see from an
> ideal twitterplaces type service..
> - I would like to support that you can do the L:home=44 mystreet,wellington
> shorthand, so folks can save space on future tweets. That is 'shorthand'
> names within the namespace of each twitter user. However, this becomes a
> problem because:
> 1. it means keeping track of *all* mentions of L:xyz= for that twitter
> user, right back in time, even when they haven't tagged it for my attention
> (ideally).
> 2. the twittermap.com api is supposed to let me look these up but i
> don't trust it, see above.
> - To get the best results from the Google maps API parser, you of course
> want to pass it the correct 'hints' so that, for instance "L:belgrade" when
> coming from an IP in Maine is interpreted as the town in the US versus an
> address in the Balkans. This works great when I call the API via Javascript
> but calling it serverside, I need to find a way to pass through the right
> 'hints' to Google - which of course need to be the hints that belong to that
> particular user. An obvious compromize would be to use the address defined
> for the twitter username, and pass that as a hint.
> - sometimes, it would be nice if my users could absolutely positively, let
> someone know exactly they are , using the full geocode (as picked off a
> 'mapPicker') eg.. "going down to the local L:park=(-36.884109,174.770416)
> for outdoor chess, see you there" or something. Using the full code is all
> very well but takes up stacks of space in twitter. What I've idly wondered
> thought would be really cool is if they could let them a single Unicode tag
> (appropriately watermarked / noise safe encoded) so that the code can be
> recognized. That way folks could then post something like "going down to
> L:my local for coffee #粂". That is, kinda like a little 'web bug' at the end
> of the message for 'tagging' the address within. Obviously this is inspired
> by the cool 'twitter compression' done here..http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-encoding-chal...
> --
> There are two things I'd like to actually do for my end users with the
> addresses mentioned in their twitter messages:
> 1. show them on a map (well, du'h)
> 2. let them filter messages by a faceted hierachy, so eg they click NZ, then
> get a list of regions mentioned within NZ, then click say Wellington, then
> get a list of local towns mentioned that are both in wellington and NZ. That
> is, a faceted browse based on locations mentioned.
> --
> Finally, of course I'd be keen to be able to send and receive data via JSON.
> Be happy to sign up to use the API via a server side API key etc (for rate
> limiting/enforcement of service etc) and stats and such are always good!
> In return I'd be more than happy to provide links back to, say
> twitterplaces.com from any tweets that I would show on the site etc.
> --
> Ben, seems to me there is definitely an opportunity for someone to create
> the 'bit.ly' of twitter addresses here. Twittermap got in their first but
> they screwed it up, just like tinyurl.com
> miles
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:51 AM, benn <bno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > I'd seen L: tags, didn't know where they came from. Were there any
> > features in particular you enjoyed from twittervision in terms of
> > analyzing / sharing the data that you generated from twittervision?
> > Ben
> > On Jun 21, 5:03 pm, JoMangee <jo-goo...@mangee.net.nz> wrote:
> > > I have used the L: format for some time - pioneered by
> > > twittervision.com (seehttp://
> > twitter.com/twittervisionandhttp://newzealand.twittervision.com/) My feed
> > is athttp://twittervision.com/JoMangee > > > - but due to API limits etc - it doesn't update well. It used to use
> > > the Jabber feed AFAIK.
> > > From my garnered understanding - It uses a two stage process - the
> > > first time you define a space (either via Facebook Apphttp://
> > apps.facebook.com/twittervision, in a Tweet or on the
> > > Twittervision.com or Twittermaps.com sites) you specify the actual
> > > geocodable location first like L:Mojo=5 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New
> > > Zealand: (note end colon) and the bot or the Ether saves that for your
> > > user id. From then on you can specify L:Mojo and it will plot you at
> > > that location. You don't need a trailing colon for simple names as
> > > long as the stuff after is not going to be parsed as an address.
> > > Twittervision seems to be broken for FB app and site for me at the
> > > moment at the moment - but a new beta is out - David Troy is the guy
> > > behind it, I've been meaning to have a chat with him. There is some
> > > API info.
> > > I currently have ~40 locations saved in twittervision - things like
> > > L:home and L:bed, L:dairy, L:kindy L:Syn Bar L:comms (L:work wouldn't
> > > update when I changed jobs) I just added one now ..but it doesn't seem
> > > to add new locations anymore - can only use old ones. eg L:Wellington
> > > I was planning to peruse the API and see if I could suck out my data
> > > and make it portable...
> > > eg:
> > > L:SX=The Southern Cross Bar and Restaurant, 35 Abel Smith St,
> > > Wellington, New Zealand: -- see how the first part is a full name,
> > > then the address.. ?
> > > I also tend to use "heading|headed to L:location" or similar to
> > > indicate i'm in transit from the last location to new one. In an
> > > unconnected world - still is useful
> > > So I welcome our new geocoding masters... keen to collaborate, and
> > > integrate with the likes of zoomin.co.nz places or google apis,
> > > Firebird, Britekite, LOKI etc.
I had a prototype that created a shortened url for a map place (like bit.y
or is.gd), but it felt a bit spammy filling up my tweets with
http://twipla.com/x123 - that's why i went for L: tags.
Anyone out there keen to come test twitterplaces with me? It's working
pretty well now. :)
> Hey miles - are you on gtalk or skype? I'd be keen to collaborate :)
> Ben
> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Miles Thompson <utu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> PS
>> Ben be more than happy to show you the website and have a chat to you
>> about the location parsing I'm working on sometime.
>> Don't wanna send the link just this second because I need to seed the site
>> with example tweet data for it to look anything other than totally stupid
>> etc but could get it primed up to show you
>> miles
>> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Miles Thompson <utu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Hey Ben, all,
>>> I have some thoughts on what features I've been looking for/to build as
>>> regards to addresses in twitter et al below.
>>> But first off let me also plus one the use of the "L:" format for
>>> addresses in twitter. I'm not in love with it, but well:
>>> - When I looked into this a few months ago I was under the impression it
>>> was already the defacto standard.
>>> - "$" is already used by http://stocktwits.com/ as a symbol to indicate
>>> stock tickers - eg http://stocktwits.com/u/spiderhay/2262257078
>>> Also worth nothing that twittervision and twittermap don't actually
>>> 'work' very well, far as I can tell. For instance I laughed to see
>>> @JoMangee, conscientious L: tagger showing up in Uttar Pradesh on
>>> twittervision just now http://twitpic.com/830dm.
>>> As for myself I can't seem to convince 'it' that I am *not* in the mid
>>> west US.
>>> So.. perhaps an oppotunity for someone to do this stuff right?
>>> Twitterplaces.com is certainly a good url to do this from.
>>> --
>>> Here is what I, persoonally would be looking for in a twitter related
>>> address service, regardless of how the address is tagged.
>>> I've recently been building an app that needs to parse addresses out of
>>> twitter feeds and basically here is what I've thinking I would have to do
>>> myself - however if I can offload this to a service that specializes in this
>>> stuff then all the better. Just like I am very glad to offload definitive
>>> url making to bit.ly and its API I'd be very keen to offload the address
>>> stuff to, say, twitterplaces.com.
>>> In address parsing basically what I want is:
>>> 1. something easy for users to type and read as if they were speaking
>>> (relatively) normally
>>> 2. format as short as can be
>>> 3. something to geocode the above
>>> 4. a hook to get other meta data (such as aliases, address, locality,
>>> town, region, country data, where possible) and possibly a 'definitive' url
>>> for all mentions of that address/ or addresses nearby etc..
>>> --
>>> I've gotten reasonably far with the above by just throwing the text after
>>> the L: at the GoogleMaps Geocoder service. (eg
>>> http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/geocoding-ext...) however encountered the following issues, which I am yet to work around. I
>>> guess these constitute a wish list of features I would like to see from an
>>> ideal twitterplaces type service..
>>> - I would like to support that you can do the L:home=44
>>> mystreet,wellington shorthand, so folks can save space on future tweets.
>>> That is 'shorthand' names within the namespace of each twitter user.
>>> However, this becomes a problem because:
>>> 1. it means keeping track of *all* mentions of L:xyz= for that
>>> twitter user, right back in time, even when they haven't tagged it for my
>>> attention (ideally).
>>> 2. the twittermap.com api is supposed to let me look these up but i
>>> don't trust it, see above.
>>> - To get the best results from the Google maps API parser, you of course
>>> want to pass it the correct 'hints' so that, for instance "L:belgrade" when
>>> coming from an IP in Maine is interpreted as the town in the US versus an
>>> address in the Balkans. This works great when I call the API via Javascript
>>> but calling it serverside, I need to find a way to pass through the right
>>> 'hints' to Google - which of course need to be the hints that belong to that
>>> particular user. An obvious compromize would be to use the address defined
>>> for the twitter username, and pass that as a hint.
>>> - sometimes, it would be nice if my users could absolutely positively,
>>> let someone know exactly they are , using the full geocode (as picked off a
>>> 'mapPicker') eg.. "going down to the local L:park=(-36.884109,174.770416)
>>> for outdoor chess, see you there" or something. Using the full code is all
>>> very well but takes up stacks of space in twitter. What I've idly wondered
>>> thought would be really cool is if they could let them a single Unicode tag
>>> (appropriately watermarked / noise safe encoded) so that the code can be
>>> recognized. That way folks could then post something like "going down to
>>> L:my local for coffee #粂". That is, kinda like a little 'web bug' at the end
>>> of the message for 'tagging' the address within. Obviously this is inspired
>>> by the cool 'twitter compression' done here..
>>> http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-encoding-chal...
>>> --
>>> There are two things I'd like to actually do for my end users with the
>>> addresses mentioned in their twitter messages:
>>> 1. show them on a map (well, du'h)
>>> 2. let them filter messages by a faceted hierachy, so eg they click NZ,
>>> then get a list of regions mentioned within NZ, then click say Wellington,
>>> then get a list of local towns mentioned that are both in wellington and NZ.
>>> That is, a faceted browse based on locations mentioned.
>>> --
>>> Finally, of course I'd be keen to be able to send and receive data via
>>> JSON. Be happy to sign up to use the API via a server side API key etc (for
>>> rate limiting/enforcement of service etc) and stats and such are always
>>> good!
>>> In return I'd be more than happy to provide links back to, say
>>> twitterplaces.com from any tweets that I would show on the site etc.
>>> --
>>> Ben, seems to me there is definitely an opportunity for someone to create
>>> the 'bit.ly' of twitter addresses here. Twittermap got in their first
>>> but they screwed it up, just like tinyurl.com
>>> miles
>>> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:51 AM, benn <bno...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> I'd seen L: tags, didn't know where they came from. Were there any
>>>> features in particular you enjoyed from twittervision in terms of
>>>> analyzing / sharing the data that you generated from twittervision?
>>>> Ben
>>>> On Jun 21, 5:03 pm, JoMangee <jo-goo...@mangee.net.nz> wrote:
>>>> > I have used the L: format for some time - pioneered by
>>>> > twittervision.com (seehttp://
>>>> twitter.com/twittervisionandhttp://newzealand.twittervision.com/) My
>>>> feed is athttp://twittervision.com/JoMangee >>>> > - but due to API limits etc - it doesn't update well. It used to use
>>>> > the Jabber feed AFAIK.
>>>> > From my garnered understanding - It uses a two stage process - the
>>>> > first time you define a space (either via Facebook Apphttp://
>>>> apps.facebook.com/twittervision, in a Tweet or on the
>>>> > Twittervision.com or Twittermaps.com sites) you specify the actual
>>>> > geocodable location first like L:Mojo=5 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New
>>>> > Zealand: (note end colon) and the bot or the Ether saves that for your
>>>> > user id. From then on you can specify L:Mojo and it will plot you at
>>>> > that location. You don't need a trailing colon for simple names as
>>>> > long as the stuff after is not going to be parsed as an address.
>>>> > Twittervision seems to be broken for FB app and site for me at the
>>>> > moment at the moment - but a new beta is out - David Troy is the guy
>>>> > behind it, I've been meaning to have a chat with him. There is some
>>>> > API info.
>>>> > I currently have ~40 locations saved in twittervision - things like
>>>> > L:home and L:bed, L:dairy, L:kindy L:Syn Bar L:comms (L:work wouldn't
>>>> > update when I changed jobs) I just added one now ..but it doesn't seem
>>>> > to add new locations anymore - can only use old ones. eg L:Wellington
>>>> > I was planning to peruse the API and see if I could suck out my data
>>>> > and make it portable...
>>>> > eg:
>>>> > L:SX=The Southern Cross Bar and Restaurant, 35 Abel Smith St,
>>>> > Wellington, New Zealand: -- see how the first part is a full name,
>>>> > then the address.. ?
>>>> > I also tend to use "heading|headed to L:location" or similar to
>>>> > indicate i'm in transit from the last location to new one. In an
>>>> > unconnected world - still is useful
>>>> > So I welcome our new geocoding masters... keen to collaborate, and
>>>> > integrate with the likes of zoomin.co.nz places or google apis,
>>>> > Firebird, Britekite, LOKI etc.
Twitterplaces works as a storage for users locations. So if someone
wants to tweet about something happening at a place and you want to
lookup a lat/lng that the user was referring to with that tweet - you
can programmatically get it from twitterplaces.
Anyway - that's what I'm implementing at the moment - if anyone has
some twitter-tools they'd like to twitterplaces-enable, I would much
appreciate your early-adopter feedback.
Ben
On Jun 24, 1:38 pm, Ben Nolan <bno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I had a prototype that created a shortened url for a map place (like bit.y
> or is.gd), but it felt a bit spammy filling up my tweets withhttp://twipla.com/x123- that's why i went for L: tags.
> Anyone out there keen to come test twitterplaces with me? It's working
> pretty well now. :)
> > Hey miles - are you on gtalk or skype? I'd be keen to collaborate :)
> > Ben
> > On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 6:54 PM, Miles Thompson <utu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >> PS
> >> Ben be more than happy to show you the website and have a chat to you
> >> about the location parsing I'm working on sometime.
> >> Don't wanna send the link just this second because I need to seed the site
> >> with example tweet data for it to look anything other than totally stupid
> >> etc but could get it primed up to show you
> >> miles
> >> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 6:40 PM, Miles Thompson <utu...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Hey Ben, all,
> >>> I have some thoughts on what features I've been looking for/to build as
> >>> regards to addresses in twitter et al below.
> >>> But first off let me also plus one the use of the "L:" format for
> >>> addresses in twitter. I'm not in love with it, but well:
> >>> - When I looked into this a few months ago I was under the impression it
> >>> was already the defacto standard.
> >>> - "$" is already used byhttp://stocktwits.com/as a symbol to indicate
> >>> stock tickers - eghttp://stocktwits.com/u/spiderhay/2262257078
> >>> Also worth nothing that twittervision and twittermap don't actually
> >>> 'work' very well, far as I can tell. For instance I laughed to see
> >>> @JoMangee, conscientious L: tagger showing up in Uttar Pradesh on
> >>> twittervision just nowhttp://twitpic.com/830dm.
> >>> As for myself I can't seem to convince 'it' that I am *not* in the mid
> >>> west US.
> >>> So.. perhaps an oppotunity for someone to do this stuff right?
> >>> Twitterplaces.com is certainly a good url to do this from.
> >>> --
> >>> Here is what I, persoonally would be looking for in a twitter related
> >>> address service, regardless of how the address is tagged.
> >>> I've recently been building an app that needs to parse addresses out of
> >>> twitter feeds and basically here is what I've thinking I would have to do
> >>> myself - however if I can offload this to a service that specializes in this
> >>> stuff then all the better. Just like I am very glad to offload definitive
> >>> url making to bit.ly and its API I'd be very keen to offload the address
> >>> stuff to, say, twitterplaces.com.
> >>> In address parsing basically what I want is:
> >>> 1. something easy for users to type and read as if they were speaking
> >>> (relatively) normally
> >>> 2. format as short as can be
> >>> 3. something to geocode the above
> >>> 4. a hook to get other meta data (such as aliases, address, locality,
> >>> town, region, country data, where possible) and possibly a 'definitive' url
> >>> for all mentions of that address/ or addresses nearby etc..
> >>> --
> >>> I've gotten reasonably far with the above by just throwing the text after
> >>> the L: at the GoogleMaps Geocoder service. (eg
> >>>http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/examples/geocoding-ext...) however encountered the following issues, which I am yet to work around. I
> >>> guess these constitute a wish list of features I would like to see from an
> >>> ideal twitterplaces type service..
> >>> - I would like to support that you can do the L:home=44
> >>> mystreet,wellington shorthand, so folks can save space on future tweets.
> >>> That is 'shorthand' names within the namespace of each twitter user.
> >>> However, this becomes a problem because:
> >>> 1. it means keeping track of *all* mentions of L:xyz= for that
> >>> twitter user, right back in time, even when they haven't tagged it for my
> >>> attention (ideally).
> >>> 2. the twittermap.com api is supposed to let me look these up but i
> >>> don't trust it, see above.
> >>> - To get the best results from the Google maps API parser, you of course
> >>> want to pass it the correct 'hints' so that, for instance "L:belgrade" when
> >>> coming from an IP in Maine is interpreted as the town in the US versus an
> >>> address in the Balkans. This works great when I call the API via Javascript
> >>> but calling it serverside, I need to find a way to pass through the right
> >>> 'hints' to Google - which of course need to be the hints that belong to that
> >>> particular user. An obvious compromize would be to use the address defined
> >>> for the twitter username, and pass that as a hint.
> >>> - sometimes, it would be nice if my users could absolutely positively,
> >>> let someone know exactly they are , using the full geocode (as picked off a
> >>> 'mapPicker') eg.. "going down to the local L:park=(-36.884109,174.770416)
> >>> for outdoor chess, see you there" or something. Using the full code is all
> >>> very well but takes up stacks of space in twitter. What I've idly wondered
> >>> thought would be really cool is if they could let them a single Unicode tag
> >>> (appropriately watermarked / noise safe encoded) so that the code can be
> >>> recognized. That way folks could then post something like "going down to
> >>> L:my local for coffee #粂". That is, kinda like a little 'web bug' at the end
> >>> of the message for 'tagging' the address within. Obviously this is inspired
> >>> by the cool 'twitter compression' done here..
> >>>http://stackoverflow.com/questions/891643/twitter-image-encoding-chal...
> >>> --
> >>> There are two things I'd like to actually do for my end users with the
> >>> addresses mentioned in their twitter messages:
> >>> 1. show them on a map (well, du'h)
> >>> 2. let them filter messages by a faceted hierachy, so eg they click NZ,
> >>> then get a list of regions mentioned within NZ, then click say Wellington,
> >>> then get a list of local towns mentioned that are both in wellington and NZ.
> >>> That is, a faceted browse based on locations mentioned.
> >>> --
> >>> Finally, of course I'd be keen to be able to send and receive data via
> >>> JSON. Be happy to sign up to use the API via a server side API key etc (for
> >>> rate limiting/enforcement of service etc) and stats and such are always
> >>> good!
> >>> In return I'd be more than happy to provide links back to, say
> >>> twitterplaces.com from any tweets that I would show on the site etc.
> >>> --
> >>> Ben, seems to me there is definitely an opportunity for someone to create
> >>> the 'bit.ly' of twitter addresses here. Twittermap got in their first
> >>> but they screwed it up, just like tinyurl.com
> >>> miles
> >>> On Mon, Jun 22, 2009 at 7:51 AM, benn <bno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> I'd seen L: tags, didn't know where they came from. Were there any
> >>>> features in particular you enjoyed from twittervision in terms of
> >>>> analyzing / sharing the data that you generated from twittervision?
> >>>> Ben
> >>>> On Jun 21, 5:03 pm, JoMangee <jo-goo...@mangee.net.nz> wrote:
> >>>> > I have used the L: format for some time - pioneered by
> >>>> > twittervision.com (seehttp://
> >>>> twitter.com/twittervisionandhttp://newzealand.twittervision.com/) My
> >>>> feed is athttp://twittervision.com/JoMangee > >>>> > - but due to API limits etc - it doesn't update well. It used to use
> >>>> > the Jabber feed AFAIK.
> >>>> > From my garnered understanding - It uses a two stage process - the
> >>>> > first time you define a space (either via Facebook Apphttp://
> >>>> apps.facebook.com/twittervision, in a Tweet or on the
> >>>> > Twittervision.com or Twittermaps.com sites) you specify the actual
> >>>> > geocodable location first like L:Mojo=5 Kent Terrace, Wellington, New
> >>>> > Zealand: (note end colon) and the bot or the Ether saves that for your
> >>>> > user id. From then on you can specify L:Mojo and it will plot you at
> >>>> > that location. You don't need a trailing colon for simple names as
> >>>> > long as the stuff after is not going to be parsed as an address.
> >>>> > Twittervision seems to be broken for FB app and site for me at the
> >>>> > moment at the moment - but a new beta is out - David Troy is the guy
> >>>> > behind it, I've been meaning to have a chat with him. There is some
> >>>> > API info.
> >>>> > I currently have ~40 locations saved in twittervision - things like
> >>>> > L:home and L:bed, L:dairy, L:kindy L:Syn Bar L:comms (L:work wouldn't
> >>>> > update when I changed jobs) I just added one now ..but it doesn't seem
> >>>> > to add new locations anymore - can only use old ones. eg L:Wellington
> >>>> > I was planning to peruse the API and see if I could suck out my data
> >>>> > and make it portable...
> >>>> > eg:
> >>>> > L:SX=The Southern Cross Bar and Restaurant, 35 Abel Smith St,
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