An idea in GSOC

[ya zhang]

Hi,

I'm a student and want to take part in GSoC 2013. And here I have a good idea about twitter.

Discover is a very important function in the twitter system. We find our friends, discover what is the most popular, searching for interesting people and so on.

Through this function, people follows much more other people. And this enhances communications between us.

But, it only exists in virtual world. Sometimes we hope what we do in virtual can affect the real world. So it's not enough, maybe we can add a function to discover twitters nearby us. 

Now all twitters can add a location information. We can use user's current location to find twitters nearby. And it can really affect the real world.

For example, a Starbucks near your office has a "big" deal today and posted a twitter. But you haven't followed it. Because you never thought a small Starbucks has a twitter. And also you can't discover it from the discover page.

But when you open the nearby discover page, it just show up in front. A "big" deal coffee. What nice day, right? And the Starbucks also got what they want -- a customer followed.

It's the same condition in all shops, markets and things like that.

Consider another case. An UFO landed behind your neighbor's house(what a pity) and he posted some pictures. Of course you didn't followed your neighbor, so when you know you are so close to an UFO, they have left.

But if you use nearby discover, you may get time to have a cup of coffee with aliens. And since your neighbor has a good relationship with aliens, follow him is a good choice.

So I think this function has a good effect to the twitter system. And when we show twitters in Google map, it because really cool.

The basic function will have two parts: first, show nearby twitters in list model. And second, show in Google map.

All suggestions are welcome. Thank you.

[Chris Aniszczyk (zx)]

Your idea is definitely neat and we are working on similar things within Twitter. However, our GSOC focus is on open source projects that help Twitter run as a service (not the actual service itself). There's a lot of infrastructure focus and the projects come from us and other open source organizations. The end goal is to work on things that will benefit the open source community as a whole. With that said, I don't meant to discourage you but you can see our ideas here:

https://github.com/twitter/twitter.github.com/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code-2013