As we’ve mentioned before in this blog, the Geo Technologies group are aptly geographically disparate, split across Sunnyvale CA, London UK and Bangalore India. The London part of the group are responsible for the care, feeding and well being of our WOEIDs but while we were asleep last night in WOEID 44418 something big happened in WOEID 2487956.
Twitter are going to be using WOEIDs to help people track trending topics, in real time, by their location, so helping to answer the perennial question “what’s happening where I am?”. Twitter understands the power and flexibility that geotagging by WOEID yields:
“We’re using Yahoo!’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to name each location that we have information for — we’re doing so because those IDs give not only language-agnostic, but also permanent, stable, and unique identifiers for geographic locations”
The WOEIDs returned by the Twitter API can be easily used with any other API which knows how to speak WOEIDs, such as Flickr, Fire Eagle and GeoPlanet, which in turn adds to success of our Open Location ethos.
You can read the full announcement post on the Twitter API Announcement list together with complemenatary coverage over on TechCrunch.
(WOEID 44418 is London and WOEID 2487956 is San Francisco by the way).
Gary Gale, Director of Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies
[...] API is a RESTful API that returns results in both XML and JSON. Twitter has decided to utilize Yahoo’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to identify locations for which it has trending data. WOEIDs are unique identifiers for place names [...]
[...] API is a RESTful API that returns results in both XML and JSON. Twitter has decided to utilize Yahoo’s Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to identify locations for which it has trending data. WOEIDs are unique identifiers for place names [...]
[...] Because I don’t think this announcement got sufficient attention: Twitter is using Yahoo’s WOEIDs to identify locations in its Geolocation API. [...]