LBS LATAM 2010

Twitter and Maps – Locating your followers one tweet at a time

Twitter announced the Geotagging API back in August and officially released it by the end of November Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro already support this API.

Three weeks after of the official Geotagging API release I made a quick search looking for applications that use a combination of Twitter and maps. Note that these applications are not necessarily using the Geotagging API. My main interest was to find integrations of twitter and location/maps. SOME of the results are attached to the end of these notes. Note I didn’t try them or endorse here any of those applications. I hope you can leave a comment if you are using any of them.

Looking for answers

After a few days of looking at my word processor’s empty page I remained only with questions (and very few answers). Instead of continuing to look for some insights, let me share with you what I’m trying to understand, may be together we can come up with some logic.

1. If we consider that the reason to put a business, or invest time in development, is to generate revenue, how are those companies going to monetize this map integration?
2. I can understand the business side of collecting information for data mining, but what is the actual added value for a user to see tweets in a map?
3. Twitter makes two things clear. The first is that you can “delete all location data”, and the second is that there is no guarantee the information will be removed from all 3rd party application’s. What about some privacy standards? Are you aware that 3rd parties are storing, using and maybe selling your location? It might be useful to control where employees are twitting from…
4. Asking for business models for applications around twitter is already difficult. Considering the costs of putting a location application, including maps, data transfer and other LBS components, do you have an idea how to monetize this integration?

As I mentioned, I have many other questions. Once you get bored of seeing windows of tweets opening over a map give me a call. May be we can use these features to develop something useful to the users and profitable for the ones investing the efforts.

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Some of the Apps that integrates Twitter and Location / Maps

Following are some of the Twitter + maps apps I found. The challenge was to describe them in 140 characters or less and where possible I added the twitter ID of the developers.

Feel free to “cut and tweet”

Continue reading and see the full list of Twitter and Maps app here Read the rest of this entry »