Geodata in Twitter's and Jaiku's APIs
Luistxo Fernandez
2007/10/11 17:15
In a travel he made to the Basque Country (he attended a conference) last july, Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku showed interest in meeting the local webscene. Some friends organised that and it was a nice afternoon to talk. I already chronicled that.
(pic by Miguel Garcia, main organizer of that meetup)
Now that Google bought Jaiku, I feel happy for Jyri, his team and family. I hope this is a opportunity to keep pushing this tool. However, just a reminder. Not only Jyri talked at that Basque meetup, but we at the audience also presented some slides. I talked about Geography in microblogging and presence apps. I guess the slide show is always a insuficient way to substitute the talk, but there it is.
However, I would like to raise a point. Comparing Twitter and Jaiku, and how they present location in their systems and APIs, Jaiku gets the upper hand for now. Location is, for the moment, just a string in Twitter, meaning anything. In Jaiku it's more structured, a triple layer of Country / City / Neighborhood is stored, and when combined with the celltagging capabilities of their Nokia mobile client app, that becomes quite useful to determine location of people in your circle:
<location>
<neighbourhood>Kamppi</neighborhood>
<city>Helsinki</city>
<country>Finland</country>
</location>
That's more structured than Twitter's but, please, Jaikuites, make it a little bit more structured:
<location>
<geo>60.1637687683,24.9310493469</geo>
<neighbourhood>Kamppi</neighborhood>
<city>Helsinki</city>
<country>Finland</country>
</location>
It would be great to interact with that kind of data thru the API, writing and reading. And, certainly, opening the celltagging data would make us salivate even more ;-)
(pic by Miguel Garcia, main organizer of that meetup)
Now that Google bought Jaiku, I feel happy for Jyri, his team and family. I hope this is a opportunity to keep pushing this tool. However, just a reminder. Not only Jyri talked at that Basque meetup, but we at the audience also presented some slides. I talked about Geography in microblogging and presence apps. I guess the slide show is always a insuficient way to substitute the talk, but there it is.
However, I would like to raise a point. Comparing Twitter and Jaiku, and how they present location in their systems and APIs, Jaiku gets the upper hand for now. Location is, for the moment, just a string in Twitter, meaning anything. In Jaiku it's more structured, a triple layer of Country / City / Neighborhood is stored, and when combined with the celltagging capabilities of their Nokia mobile client app, that becomes quite useful to determine location of people in your circle:
<location>
<neighbourhood>Kamppi</neighborhood>
<city>Helsinki</city>
<country>Finland</country>
</location>
That's more structured than Twitter's but, please, Jaikuites, make it a little bit more structured:
<location>
<geo>60.1637687683,24.9310493469</geo>
<neighbourhood>Kamppi</neighborhood>
<city>Helsinki</city>
<country>Finland</country>
</location>
It would be great to interact with that kind of data thru the API, writing and reading. And, certainly, opening the celltagging data would make us salivate even more ;-)