Latitudes and Longitudes in the "Location" Field

[brentos]

Hi Folks,

Does anyone know from where these come? I'm speaking of the lat/lons
in the actual "Location" field of the user, not the new per-tweet
location stuff. It appears to be fixed for the vast majority of users
to a single latitude and longitude. Do certain clients insert this
once and then leave it?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

- Brent

[Taylor Singletary]

These are generally saved once by mobile-based Twitter clients, as you've surmised!

Taylor

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[brentos]

Hi Taylor,

Thanks for the quick answer! Do you happen to know any further
detail? In particular, we're curious which clients do this and what
their exact process is. Do they ask the user to use their location?
Why don't they continually update it?

Thanks very much!

- Brent

On Sep 9, 9:34 am, Taylor Singletary <taylorsinglet...@twitter.com>
wrote:

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I'm not sure what Twitter's mobile client does on the Android - I've
stopped using it. But Seesmic appears to do a GPS call each time I
post a tweet. I haven't cycled through all three of the location
options available with Froyo, but I do see the little GPS icon flash
every time I post a tweet in Seesmic.

On a desktop / laptop, or on the Android using mobile.twitter.com,
it's more complicated, and Twitter's interactions with the browser
sometimes don't work at all. I can do a "search for place" and
sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I'm sure the location
folks inside Twitter have log files they can use to diagnose these
issues.

The net effect from my point of view is that Twitter's location
offering is not solid, stable and end-user-friendly as yet. Yes, some
of the clients are broken too, but Twitter's servers aren't *always*
responding *correctly* to legitimate requests.

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net http://twitter.com/znmeb

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." - Paul Erdos

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

--
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky
http://borasky-research.net http://twitter.com/znmeb

"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." - Paul Erdos

Quoting brentos <brent...@gmail.com>:

> Hi Taylor,
>
> Thanks for the quick answer! Do you happen to know any further
> detail? In particular, we're curious which clients do this and what
> their exact process is. Do they ask the user to use their location?
> Why don't they continually update it?

I used to run all the free Twitter clients on my Android (Verizon
Droid Incredible). Most of them appeared to be grabbing the location
each time I posted a tweet, and most of them have an option to grab
the location on demand.

After a few weeks of experimentation, I settled on the Seesmic client
as the best available on the basis of functionality and usability.
Twidroyd, Touiteur, Twitter's own client and the HTC "Peep" client
built into the Incredible were mostly equivalent in functionality, but
Seesmic did what I wanted better and was much easier to use.

One other note: Google and Verizon are very cautious when a Droid
Incredible user turns on location capabilities. There are numerous
points where you need to opt-in to get location-based services to
work. These are big companies with lots of lawyers, and they want to
make sure their behinds are covered. The default appears to be that
location is enabled only for emergency (911) calls. ;-)