Getting Local With Twitter

I used to be a big fan of TwitterLocal until the landing page started displaying this message:

Since Twitter cut off their Jabber feed from TwitterLocal, we had to rely purely on the XML API, which meant that only about 20% of Tweets from the public timeline got into TwitterLocal.

Which in turn forced them to shut down the web service and create a desktop app.

I personally have enough applications running on my desktop and preferred to keep my conversations organized in my browser. So it’s a good thing Twitter has it’s own TwitterLocal type service built into it that is actually very easy to use. It’s called geocode and can be used right inside Twitter Search.

The geocode docu reads as follows:

geocode: returns tweets by users located within a given radius of the given latitude/longitude, where the user’s location is taken from their Twitter profile. The parameter value is specified by “latitide,longitude,radius”, where radius units must be specified as either “mi” (miles) or “km” (kilometers). 

Well this is all fine and dandy if you know the latitude and longitude of your location off the top of your head. To make my life easier (and hopefully now yours), I created a Yahoo Pipe that creates a geocode for you as well as links you to a page that can display the results.

You can click the link that was generated to view your local results instantly or you can copy your geocode into your favorite Twitter Search engine. Geocode can be used in most Twitter Search engines like Tweet Explorer, TweetGrid and plain old Twitter Search.

I personally use geocode in one of my grid blocks in TweetGrid so I am always up to date on local happenings.