Identifying twitter user's longitude and latitude

Question

As per my requirement in need to search twitter and display user's location on map. Can anyone help me identifying longitude and latitude from search api result?

Answer 1

Last time I looked it didn't include it officially, unless the specific client (such as an iphone client) specifically updated your location to lat+long coordinates.

When I did something similar I passed the Twitter RSS output through an rss geotagging service, then used the output from that to map. It worked, but 99% of the tweets were just city centres, so it was pretty pointless :-(

Answer 2

Twitter hasn't released their new geocoding API yet. Twitter's API Documentation is available here.

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-API-Documentation

As you can see, most of the current API methods return an empty "geo" tag. Once Twitter has rolled out their geo implementation, this tag will be populated.

Answer 3

You'd probably be best to see what "location" the user has set then use a geo-coding api to try and convert that location into lat/lng.

e.g. use http://apiwiki.twitter.com/Twitter-REST-API-Method%3A-users%C2%A0show to find out the user's location, then use google's geocoding API (http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/geocoding/) to do the rest.

Also you would probably want to do some pre-processing on the location to see if it's already a lat/lng pair (as some users update their location in this manner).