Twitter turned on its API for geotagging tweets yesterday, as announce in in a post on their blog, Think Globally, Tweet Locally. Currently, geographic information will only be associated with your tweets if you use an application that adds it and will only be used to display your tweets when viewed with an application that can exploit it. Here’s the way Twitter described it.
“This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted.”
Examining Twitter’s status update API description shows how one associates a location with a Tweet. Pretty simple.
Since disclosing your location raises privacy concerns, Twitter has made geotagging an opt-in service and also allows users to delete all of the location information associated with their tweets. Moreover, their policy, as described here, says
“We require application developers to be upfront and obvious about when they are Geotagging an update. If you ever find that an application is doing it without notifying you, please let us know.”
Twitter has updated its privacy policy to cover location information.
The Financial Times has an article, Note by ‘teenage scribbler’ causes sensation, on a research study written by a 15 year old Morgan Stanley intern on the new and old media habits of UK youth.
“Morgan Stanley’s European media analysts asked Matthew Robson, one of the bank’s interns from a London school, to describe his friends’ media habits.
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“Teenagers do not use Twitter,” he pronounced. Updating the micro-blogging service from mobile phones costs valuable credit, he wrote, and “they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless”.
His peers find it hard to make time for regular television, and would rather listen to advert-free music on websites such as Last.fm than tune into traditional radio. Even online, teens find advertising “extremely annoying and pointless”.
Their time and money is spent instead on cinema, concerts and video game consoles which, he said, now double as a more attractive vehicle for chatting with friends than the phone.
Mr Robson had little comfort for struggling print publishers, saying no teenager he knew regularly reads a newspaper since most “cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text” rather than see summaries online or on television.”
Social media systems share some aspects of television, but not all. They differ in that their content is created by their users. While the revolution will not be televised, it can be tweeted. It’s been more than 50 years since TV was the thing.
“Iranians are blogging, posting to Facebook and, most visibly, coordinating their protests on Twitter, the messaging service. Their activity has increased, not decreased, since the presidential elections on Friday and ensuing attempts by the government to restrict or censor their online communications.
On Twitter, reports and links to photos from a peaceful mass march through Tehran on Monday, along with accounts of street fighting and casualties around the country, have become the most popular topic on the service worldwide, according to Twitter’s published statistics.
A couple of Twitter feeds have become virtual media offices for the supporters of the leading opposition candidate, Mir Hussein Moussavi. One feed, mousavi1388, (1388 is the year in the Persian calendar) is filled with news of protests and exhortations to keep up the fight, in Persian and English. It has more than 7,000 followers. Mr. Moussavi’s fan group on Facebook has swelled to over 50,000 members, a significant increase since election day.”
The article also reports on efforts to encourage cyber attacks on Iran sites
“Some Twitter users were also going on the offensive. On Monday morning, an antigovernment activist using the Twitter account “DDOSIran” asked supporters to visit a Web site to participate in an online attack to try to crash government Web sites by overwhelming them with traffic. By Monday afternoon, many of those sites were not accessible, though it was not clear if the attack was responsible — and the Twitter account behind the attack had been removed. A Twitter spokeswoman said the company had no connection to the deletion of the account.”
A php script is still available on the web and can be found if you search for it.
The urban areas of Iran is developed and many there use social media, including Twitter. You can see their reactions to the election results and the public unrest in response to it via their tweets. Use this Twitter search query for a sample. This is an important example of how social media is having an impact on news.
We all know that some programming languages are a joy to use and others can be damned painful. Lukas Biewald ran an interesting experiment to gather some data about this in his post, The Programming Language with the Happiest Users.
“Which languages make programmers the happiest? … I decided to do a little market research. I scraped the top 150 most recent tweets on Twitter for the query “X language” where X was one of {COBOL, Ruby, Fortran, Python, Visual Basic, Perl, Java, Haskell, Lisp, C}. Then I asked three people on Amazon Mechanical Turk to verify that the tweet was on the topic. If so, I asked if the tweet seemed positive, negative or neutral. …”
Great idea and a nice use of Amazon Mechanical Turk!
While we can use Twitter for news or reports on unfolding events from the field, it’s a noisy channel. As usual, Randall Munroe captures it well. I especially like its highlighting how Twitter’s search page lets you know there have been dozens of new matching tweets since you searched a moment ago. It seems that the flu-related tweets are arriving faster than anyone can read them.
A graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison has developed a system that allows a person to send tweets just by thinking.
Researchers use brain interface to post to Twitter In early April, Adam Wilson posted a status update on the social networking Web site Twitter — just by thinking about it. Just 23 characters long, his message, “using EEG to send tweet,” demonstrates a natural, manageable way in which “locked-in” patients can couple brain-computer interface technologies with modern communication tools.
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“Some developers are creating tools to help companies keep an eye on the buzz. Akshay Java, a scientist at Microsoft, is trying to figure out a way to identify which experts are most influential on given topics by automatically analyzing the content of their tweets and who is in their Twitter network. Companies like Microsoft could use that information to figure out which twitterers they should contact to create buzz about a new product.”
“URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day? Below, issues to consider and a breakdown of popular services, including recommendations and services to avoid (the new DiggBar being one of these).”
They review 15 services and discuss some of the underlying issues (e.g., 301 vs. 302 redirects).
The venerable Tinyurl.com? Too long! The popular bit.ly made the cut even though it’s longer than tr.im.
Some people who study technology aren’t sure Twitter will endure.
“Frankly, I think a lot of twittering is somewhat faddish, whereas I never thought Facebook was. … People I interviewed and surveyed would talk of serious feeling of deprivation without Facebook and I’ve hardly heard anyone say that about twitter,” Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor who teaches the sociology of technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, wrote in an e-mail. “Will people Twitter five years from now? Perhaps, but I would not be surprised if they did not, or at least as much.”
Conventional wisdom is that you need a good elevator pitch if you have an idea to sell. An elevator pitch, of course, is a high-level description of your concept that is short enough to be delivered during an elevator ride — e.g., in a minute or less. This works out to about 150 to 300 words, depending on how fast you talk
I was amused to see a new PHP web framework, Twitto, advertise itself as “A web framework in a tweet” because the header code you need to add is “packed in less than 140 characters, it fits in a tweet.”
Now Twitto is not actually pushing its concept in a tweet — they use nearly 1500 characters on their splash page, for heavens sake. But I like the idea of boiling down a pitch to fit in a tweet and think it has a future.
You can’t do a tweet pitch for every idea. Some are inherently too complicated. But if you can, maybe you should, at least as an exercise. The idea of a tweet concept may the new media version of the high concept notion that was popular in Hollywood back in the 1990s.
Note: Twitto apparently has some security issues, since someone added a prominent red box on the bottom of their page with the warning “TWITTO IS NOT SECURE, DON’T USE IT FOR YOUR NEXT WEBSITE.”
Twitter founder Evan Williams gave a TED talk this earlier this month on how Twitter’s growth is driven by unexpected uses. His eight minute talk touched on twittering during dramatic events, political uses, services enabled by their API and the emergence of conventions like @reply and #hashtag.
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