greenpoint design

Twitter + Location = Utility

January 27, 2010 on 11:23 am | In IdBlog, Tools | Add a Comment

If you check your Twitter account today, you may notice a balloon in the right margin asking you to provide your location. This is part of a new Twitter initiative to filter tweets by location.

Having identified my location as New York City, I now see a list of trending topics in NYC. Today the top New York topic is #nowthatsghetto. While amusing, examples of ghetto-fabulous style are not exactly useful. However, it’s not hard to see that a chorus of tweets about an accident coming from GPS-enabled phones along the same stretch of I-95 adds up to useful traffic information.

Especially when paired with real-time search, as noted in this MIT Technology Review article. Last month Google incorporated real-time data into its search results, adding tweets to blog posts, Craigslist items and Etsy listings. For more on real-time search see the Google Blog. This is a big step toward tapping the human-network to provide timely annotation of real events.

Twitter has already proved helpful in a crisis. Last month, for example, when a pre-Christmas snowstorm blanketed the Mid-Atlantic states, my flight home was canceled.  My airline’s phone banks immediately flooded with calls from stranded travelers and the airline’s website offered only the stale notice that all flights had been canceled. An assiduous search of Twitter posts turned up a working number for the airline with an actual person on the other end. I was able to reschedule my flight for the next day. Score one for collective intelligence.

Next Christmas smart-phone wielding travelers may be able to sidestep weather-related emergencies with a quick search and a call and then go back to tweeting about really important stuff like #tackyholidaysweaters.