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
you'll see that <geo_enabled> is true for me, and if you pull one of my statuses from yesterday
then you'll see a fully populated <geo> object at the end of that status.
<status>
...
<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