Posts Tagged: twitter

Journal — 1 Comment
15
Mar 10

Deep In The Twitter (Developers) Nest

The last week has been crammed with planning for and finally realising the first WhereCamp unconference to be held in Europe. More of that later but before WhereCamp EU, there was the London Twitter Developer’s DevNest.

Angus Fox, one of the organisers of the DevNest, had first got in touch with me last year after the launch of the Yahoo! Placemaker web platform that allows recognition of place references in unstructured text. Placemaker plus Twitter status feeds seemed an ideal candidate for a mashup and Angus was keen to get me to talk to his hard-core Twitter and social media literate developer audience.

Twitter Developer Nest

Then in November 2009 Twitter announced their use of WOEIDs, the language neutral geographic identifiers that underpin Placemaker and the other Yahoo! Geo Technologies platforms, in their new Trends API. Naturally all of the Geo group at Yahoo! were excited, verging on ecstatic, at this. But getting our respective schedules in synch with each other wasn’t the easiest of things and 2009 came to a close without getting a firm date in the diary.

2010 arrived and Twitter launched their Trends API and exposed WOEIDs to the world and Angus got in touch again and we both put the seventh DevNest in our respective schedules.

Come the evening of Wednesday March 10th and I made my way to the Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Center, just north of London Bridge where I was joined by Ewan MacLeod, the straight talking and highly entertaining and informing editor of Mobile Industry Review,  Paul Kinlan, Developer Programmes Engineer at Google and a plentiful supply of beer and pizza.

Ewan went first and you knew he was tapping into a rich vein of mobile geekery when a slide of his tee shirt drew such loud chuckles and guffaws from the audience, myself included.

That's a Shit Phone

Ewan’s deck is on SlideShare.net here and it speaks for itself even without an accompanying video; I strongly urge you to browse through his deck for some fascinating stats on mobile phone usage, breakdown and penetration and for the low down on exactly how much impact the iPhone is, and more importantly, isn’t making.

I was up next and gave a talk on (Almost) Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Geo (with WOEIDs), which attempted to give this tech savvy audience a background on what geocoding, reverse geocoding and geoparsing are, why this isn’t a trivial task, what WOEIDs are and why they’re important for geo and for deriving meaning from content, such as Twitter status updates.

My deck accompanying the talk is above and there’s also a (slightly shakey) video to accompany it as well.

Closing the talks was Google’s Paul Kinlan who gave us the low down on Google’s Buzz and showed that the adage of never work with children, animals and live demos still has life it in.

Accompanied throughout by beer and pizza courtesy of the event’s sponsors, the Twitter DevNest was thoroughly enjoyable, a bit of a revelation in places and showed that Twitter has a deep and very enthusiastic developer following.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)
deliciousness — 1 Comment
25
Feb 10

Deliciousness: hairy landings, Twitter (mis)identity, escaped cat, the United States of Facebook and mapme.at

The latest batch of social bookmarks from my Delicious stream:

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

Journal — Comments Off
11
Nov 09

Have You Noticed That noticin.gs Have Noticed WOEIDs?

While everyone, well almost everyone, was fast asleep in London, Twitter quietly dropped a bomb-shell into their API announcements mailing list. Their new Trends API will help the service’s users answer the perennial question “what’s going on where am I“.

So far, so geo but Twitter has noticed what I’ve been saying in my talks and accompanying decks for the last two years or so.

“We’re using Yahoo!’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to name each location that we have information for — we’re doing so because those IDs give not only language-agnostic, but also permanent, stable, and unique identifiers for geographic locations.  For example, San Francisco has a permanent and unique WOEID of 2487956, London has 44418, and the Earth has WOEID 1.”

Whilst there have been other uses of WOEIDs in the wild, including Alex Housley’s Total Hotspots, Twitter picking on WOEIDs rather than another of the competing geo-identifiers is a massive credibility boost for the WOEID as a geographic standard for identifying and describing place.
Using WOEIDs to geotag your content, be it Twitter status messages, blog posts or photos, automagically gives you access to an ever increasing range of data and web services that understand WOEIDs as well as those that still only understand longitude and latitude. Long/lat coordinates are an attribute of WOEIDs in case you were wondering. Proof of this is visible in the elegant and oddly addictive game of Noticings.
Noticings is “a game of noticing things about you” jointly created by Tom Taylor. Tom was responsible for Boundaries, the amazing visualisation of Aaron Cope’s Flickr Alpha shapes which allows geographies, such neighbourhoods, for which no formal definition exists, to be represented and viewed.
Basically you tag Flickr photos with the “noticings” tag and the photo’s location, either from an onboard GPS or on Flickr and then you score points for your photo of something you noticed. Which doesn’t do it justice. The rules are in a constant state of flux but all to the better making it a Mornington Crescent for geotagged photos.
Using WOEIDs as a stable and consistent geoidentifier is the glue that allows such a super-web-mash-up to be created. Flickr uses WOEIDs as a geotagging mechanism, either from the EXIF data embedded in a photo or by dragging and dropping the photo on a Map; these WOEIDs are then exposed via the Flickr API. The same Flickr API can be used to look for photos meeting certain criteria, such as the noticings tag and to discover photos taken in the same location, a fundamental part of Noticings. As Tom puts it …

“(WOEIDs and GeoPlanet) gives us the opportunity to use colloquial geography rather than bounding boxes and radial searches and the like. I banged on about this in my talk at the AGI conference recently. I am such a geography bore. Anyway, we couldn’t have built Noticings without it.”

For those who like the technical gory details, Tom’s put up an excellent blog post to explain it all.

But it doesn’t stop at photos and Flickr, once you have a WOEID you can pass it to any of the ever growing number of web APIs that know how to handle WOEIDs, Yahoo’s GeoPlanet, Placemaker, Fire Eagle, YQL as well as services that speak long/lat. That’s a lot of services, and the number’s growing. Plus you get access to the horizontal and vertical relationships, parents, children and neighbours that a WOEID has as well as more obtuse colloquial geographies, all in multiple languages.

All of which is somewhat apt as I’m writing this in Munich at the back of the Telematics 2009 conference. While Munich is fine for the English speaking world, it’s München in Germany and Monaco di Baviera to the Italians. But it may also be spelt as Muenchen and Munchen if special characters or accents aren’t used. All of these names are simply multiple versions of the same place, and so are mapped to a single WOEID, 676757.

Now go and notice something.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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28
Oct 09

Deliciousness: megalomania, logos, Tube map, paper abstracts, location, Freud and tech mistakes

It’s been a while but odd, weird and even occasionally interesting stuff continues to fall down the back of the internet and gets captured in Delicious along the way. Here’s the pick of the last few weeks.
  • Today I was caught red handed trying to blow up the world … mwah hah hah hah.
  • A well known Irish budget airline found that its blue and yellow “harp” logo had suffered an, unasked for, logo makeover.
  • The London Underground Tube map regains the River Thames and gets a version for tourists.
  • Are you the sort of person who shouts at the screen “that’s not right” when watching a film? You’re not alone.
  • Looking for a nearby wifi hotspot? A low tech approach can help.
  • Microsoft’s new Windows 7 OS has inbuilt location services; but are they up to the challenge of managing location safely, securely and with sufficient flexibility?
  • Submitting a paper abstract for a conference? This might help.
  • You’ve probably heard of a Freudian Slip; now you can wear suitable slippers.
  • If Jack The Ripper was alive today, would he use Twitter?

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

deliciousness — Comments Off
4
Oct 09

Deliciousness: bacon, Protect and Survive, outing the paleotards, Fake Carol and crop circles

It’s been almost two weeks since one of these posts; I’ve been pretty much conferenced out, with FOWA London taking up a sizeable chunk of last week and the AGI’s GeoCommunity mopping up any spare time the week before that.

The hallmark of any successful tech conference is appallingly bad wifi which, despite the best protestations of the conference organisers, always buckles under the strain around 30 minutes into the opening keynote. All of which has meant that my Delicious account has been on a bit of a diet recently, but here’s what did make it through the wifi …

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

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21
Sep 09

Deliciousness: themes gained, avatars lost, accents found, London and the end of the world, scrobbling and Streetview

Look at all of this stuff that fell down the back of the internet and got lodged in my Delicious bookmarks …

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

Journal — 1 Comment
31
Aug 09

In the Spirit of Experimentation

Posterous is a service that just begs for experimentation; not only because it’s a beautifully simplistic yet rich service but also because the Help and FAQ pages can be a little bit light on detail for some of the less obvious questions; probably to avoid scaring those of a less-power-user-frame-of-mind away.

So the Posterous FAQ at http://posterous.com/faq says this “We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3′s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let’s try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one … twitpic.com

… and rival yfrog.com …

… and from my Flickr photostream …

… and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album …

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

… there’s only one way to find out, so let’s send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

deliciousness — Comments Off
20
Aug 09

Deliciousness: more bacon, UK geek location, your PIN number, birds tweeting, Ohio as a piano, OMG and WTF and UNIX turns 40.

A semi regular, almost weekly, trawl through the latest stuff on the interwebs bookmarked on Delicious.

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8
Aug 09

Deliciousness: broken customer service, Twitter on a PostIt, speaking to dogs, the end of the world and Tube maps.

This week’s selection of what I bookmarked on Delicious.

deliciousness — Comments Off
24
Jul 09

Deliciousness: USB dogs, children on espresso, recursion and Twitter spammers

This week’s selection of what caught my eye on the interwebs: