Using Twitter on Mobile Devices to capture information for Mapping Applications What is Twitter? Twitter allows users to share short messages called Tweets. A Tweet is limited to 140 characters - but can include a Photo, location or GPS coordinates if that information is available. 

What are the benefits? - Twitter provides Native Mobile applications that make use of Camera and GPS hardware across different mobile devices (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry). - Already used by many people, access to social network and viral aspects of twitter. - Supports Photos, Locations and GPS coordinates where available. - Contributors can be identified and authenticated using their Twitter account. What are the Limitations? Using Twitter for capturing Mapping information: - Capturing information and displaying mapping information are separated. - Information is limited to 140 Characters. - Websites making use of Twitter information are limited to100 queries an hour. - Requires active internet connection. - Location and coordinate information may not be available based on position and services available (this is a general limitation to all GPS based applications). 

From the Twitter perspective ... What are the requirements for capturing information? - A Twitter account. - Native twitter application installed on Mobile Device. - Internet connection. - Location services enabled on Mobile Device if Location is to be inferred. - Twitter Hash tag (#wildspots) in tweet to identify which Tweets should be used. 

Tweeting a picture with GPS location on the iPhone: 

Specifying a time GPS based location when available Quick tweet with short description Short description with notes Tweet details #wildspots Hash tag to identify Tweet to be mapped The text of the tweet can be captured in many different forms - this text is then processed and extracted by the Mapping Application 

The information from Tweets: After making a few tweets - there is already valuable information that can be used. 

Pulling the Twitter information into a Mapping Application By Finding all tweets that have been tagged with #wildspots we can then represent these on the map. The tweets have a Photo, GPS location as well as a short text part - with this basic information it is sufficient to build a map.