Twitter adds Geolocation to every tweet

by Chris | Thu, 09/24/2009 - 09:52

What are you doing and Where are you??

Twitter is planning to add location data to each and every tweet, instead of the Location field you can update currently. This definitely takes real-time to a new level, since twitter apps and mashups will no longer have to guess where you are based on that one field, although it is not going away. Some people just like to use it as a generic profile field, saying "I live here!"

Here's the skinny on the updates, provided at the Twitter Conference in LA:

  • You'll have to opt in via your Twitter profile. For security and privacy purposes there's no way to do this through a twitter app. If a particular app sends the data anyway, Twitter checks your preferences and drops the geo-data before storing the tweet.
  • Data is strictly latitude and longitude coordinates. From this, developers can figure out the name of the city, the approximate intersection, etc.
  • We won't see too much difference on twitter.com initially, it will mainly be in the hands of API developers to use the new location data.

Legal Issues

There are also some interesting legal issues involving the storage of your location in real-time, so Twitter is initially planning on completely deleting your location data after 14 days to avoid being subpoenaed for that information. They are not anonymizing it — like search engines do with their query data — they are permanently deleting it.

It seems that Twitter app developers could store it for longer periods of time, but they will become the target of subpoenas so they're being encouraged to delete the data as well. Twitter is also recommending that developers blur the data, that is, take the specific coordinates with timestamps and store them as a city name, or neighborhood. This is apparently a temporary solution as Twitter looks into storing the location data in a truly anonymous way.

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