geolocation API update

[Raffi Krikorian]

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.

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.  i say most, because, if you pull my user object

curl http://twitter.com/users/show/raffi.xml

you'll see that <geo_enabled> is true for me, and if you pull one of my statuses from yesterday

curl http://twitter.com/statuses/show/4512367904.xml

then you'll see a fully populated <geo> object at the end of that status.

<status>

  ...

  <geo xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss">

    <georss:Point>37.780300 -122.396900</georss:Point>

  </geo>

</status>

for clarification: the <geo_enabled> will always be in a user object reflecting whether the user has opted-into the geolocation API.  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.  if there is no location, then the tag will be empty.  if there is a location (as above), then the tag will be populated.

just to lay out a timeline -- we've deployed for internal testing, and soon we'll be turning this on for the general audience.

--

Raffi Krikorian

Twitter Platform Team

ra...@twitter.com | @raffi