geo twittering – the twitter / maps mashup
Sorry, but I need to do an extra post about the “geo twittering” I told you about yesterday. Why? Because it’s actually pretty cool.
At our first tours, we created the corresponding google maps after the tour. At our last tours, we used GPS trackers (Christain & Jan) and postet them as we have had an internet connection. But now in Anatolia, we dont expect to have internet so regulary. So we tried twitter:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
But the most cool feature ist that you can update your status via mobile. Just send an SMS to a twitter number, and they update your status. You can also change your location, but you dont have a location history. To solve this problem, we use the status update as location history. So we try to send our GPS coordinates at least once a day (maybe more often) and a status upate (short roundup of the day) via mobile (have a look at my twitter page to see what I mean).
<technical stuff>
Now I’m grabbing the latest status updates via the twitter api, parse the result via regexp for the coordinates and the status message and create a javascript file where I write all the selected data into.
Christian includes this file into his OpenStreetMap map. And shows the data as points on the map.
</technical stuff>
Now you can go to this map and track were we have been today and the days before.
Including time/date and the roundup of the day. You can also switch between different layers (yahoo, bing or google maps) and select the view you like most.
geo twittering, it’s eays as this.