Twitter @Location
Google’s new My Location service reminded me of an idea I had a while ago. Someone should make an application that allows people to post location data to Twitter in a more structured way. I’m not a developer and I might never get around to putting a team together for it, so I thought I’d post the idea here. If you like the concept, feel free to contact me to discuss it. You’re welcome to run with it on your own, but I’d love to participate in some way.
The service would work sort of like Foamee, the “I owe you a beer” app that sits on top of Twitter and helps you keep track of who you owe drinks. There would be a user in Twitter called “location” or something like that. To join the Twitter location service, you would add “location” to your follow list. The location app would then know to keep track of your Twitter posts through the Twitter API. If you wanted to share your location, you would post something like “@location san franciso” or “@location 500 broadway new york ny”. The location app would use the Google Maps API to find map coordinates for the phrase following @location and could do some interesting things with the data.
First, the app could display your location and the location of friends on a map hosted on the app’s site, say StatusMap.com (domain might be taken, just an example). Each user would have their own page (ie. StatusMap.com/joelaz). The site could also host some cool visualizations like the ones on TwitterVision (which is based on the hometown in people’s profiles, not their current location). Or, you could scroll through a person’s locations over time.
Second, there would be a series of widgets, Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, and other syndication tools built for sharing your location anywhere you like. If you added the syndication widget to your blog, each time you send @location info to Twitter, a small map in the sidebar of your blog would update with your new location and a timestamp. The same information would post to your Facebook page via a simple map app linked to the location service and your friends would see your location in their Facebook News Feed.
Like I said, I’m not an engineer, but this seems like a fairly simple thing to put together that would be pretty useful. In some ways, I think I might prefer this to shared GPS data in that it would give me total control over when I share and what level of detail I’d like to share. I may only be comfortable sharing city level info, or I may want to share the exact street address - I decide. Best of all, it would work with any cell phone that supports text messaging, unlike Google’s My Location, which doesn’t support the iPhone and many other devices.
Is this a good idea? Anyone want to work on it with me? What say you?
