OUseful Info

geotwitterous Now Featuring Twittervision

I really should be thinking about how to get through my mashup talk on Thursday, so I thought I'd do this instead - a quick update on geotwitterous.

In a comment to the original post (Geo Twitter - GeoCoding Your Tweets and Plotting Them on an Embeddable Map), which described a Yahoo peipe that tried to geocode a tweet based on its content, Jean-Noël asked: "Why not create a Pipes using API TwitterVision?"

If you don't know it already, Twittervision plots tweets on a map based on the twitterer's location, as specified in theri Twitter profile, or if it's declared in a tweet in a particular way. A quick look at the Twittervision API showed how easy it is to call. FOr example:

- http://api.twittervision.com/user/current_status/twitterID.xml
- http://api.twittervision.com/user/current_status/twitterID.json

It only took a few minutes to create pipe to grab this data (http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/twittervisionapi):

This pipe in turn can be embedded in another pipe that takes in a normal twitter friends feed and then grabs the twittervision details for each user who has a tweet in that feed - http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/twittervisionfriends. here are some of the interesting bits:

The regular expression finds the author (as a twitter ID) of each tweet. The Loop runs each item in the feed through the twittervision API pipe, enriching/augementing/annotating the feed with whatever Twittervision can learn about the user. Any geo information returned from twittervision is copied to the top of each feed item so it looks like geoRSS. The Location Extractor uses this geoRSS info to create a full internal geo representation; (if no geoRSS info is found, it will try to extract a location from the title/description elements of each feed item).

On the geotwitterous page, I then take a JSON output from the pipe and plot the tweets on a Google map, trying to bundle all the tweets from the same person together:

So - a map view of where my friends are twittering from...

I need to fully integrate this with my own twitter geocoder, but as a half-hour hack, it was quite satisfying :-)

Tags: geotwitterous, twittervision, yahoo pipes, pipes, mashup

Posted by ajh59 at March 18, 2008 10:52 AM