Tweet and share your location

Last week I had put up MyBooth, where you could go to for figuring out your polling booth. Essentially this is a service built on top of Twitter messages. You send out a tweet with the GPS co-ordinates and tags for that location to @tweetaloc, in the following format

@tweetaloc <message> (:<location tag>:)* L:<lat>,<lon>:

The lat, long is reverse geo-coded from geonames.org to figure out the country code, state code and nearest place name, all of these and the tags that you provided are tagged on the location and available for search on MyBooth. Currently the interface does not allow you to search in a country other than India, will fix that up shortly.

Behind the scenes is some old fashioned perl and php and Amazon SimpleDB for data storage. Uses Net::Twitter and Geo::GeoNames to poll twitter for messages and lookup geonames for the location data. A simple php page pulls the data out and feeds to Google Maps API as a geo-rss feed. Thats it nothing much there.

The itch behind this was the inability to find some place which gave out the exact location of where I could go and cast my vote. Addresses in India are ad-hoc and locating a place with just the address in hand is not easy. Online map services do not figure out the address for this reason and the only thing that can work here is crowd sourcing, like what wikimapia.org allows people to do. But then on the road putting things into wikimapia , so thats where this thing fits in, use any twitter client from your GPS enabled device and send a tweet out and this takes care of the rest.

Couple of things that I might add in to this

• search by twitter-id and tags, so you can search for @jebui’s office
• search for tags around a given location, for things like polling booths within 5kms of my current loc
• query via twitter