Adding the "Where" to the "When"

1. Adding the “where” Microsoft MIX:10 TM March 16, 2010

3. What am I going to talk about? ‣ What is a “place”? ‣ How do users expect to use “where” information? ‣ Where do you actually get “location” from? ‣ What is doing?

4. Location = Context + Relevancy

5. Location = Relevancy + Context ‣ Transforming the “What’s happening?” to “What’s happening here?” ‣ 140 characters is our limit ‣ We wanted metadata ‣ People want to talk about places

12. Sometimes the location doesn’t matter

13. What is a “place”?

14. A place is: coordinates ‣ 36o5’19.176”N, 115o10’36.084” ‣

15. A place is: coordinates ‣ 36o5’19.176”N, 115o10’36.084” ‣ A pair of decimals ‣ Gets a bit complicated when trying to account for “precision”) ‣ Doesn’t mean much to people

16. A place is: coordinates ‣ 36o5’19.176”N, 115o10’36.084” ‣ A pair of decimals ‣ Gets a bit complicated when trying to account for “precision”) ‣ Doesn’t mean much to people ‣ Needs a map to make sense

17. A place is: a polygon

18. A place is: a name

19. A place is: a name ‣ 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

20. A place is: a name ‣ 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA ‣ West Hacienda Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South

21. A place is: a name ‣ 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA ‣ West Hacienda Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South ‣ “The Strip” / Las Vegas / Nevada

22. A place is: a name ‣ 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA ‣ West Hacienda Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South ‣ “The Strip” / Las Vegas / Nevada ‣ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino

23. A place is: a name ‣ 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA ‣ West Hacienda Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South ‣ “The Strip” / Las Vegas / Nevada ‣ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino ‣ WOEID 2436704 / Twitter ID 5c2b5e46ab891f07

24. A place is: a name ‣ 3950 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA ‣ West Hacienda Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard South ‣ “The Strip” / Las Vegas / Nevada ‣ Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino ‣ WOEID 2436704 / Twitter ID 5c2b5e46ab891f07 ‣ Names are, of course, tricky when it comes to internationalization

25. How do users expect to use “where”?

26. Sharing coordinates ‣ More aptly named “geotagging” ‣ Good for sharing photos ‣ Possibly good for talking about a specific place (e.g. store, restaurant) ‣ People don’t understand numbers and without a map, there is a lack of context ‣ Huge privacy implications

27. Sharing polygons ‣ Privacy implications are potentially better ‣ If you thought sharing one pair of numbers was bad... ‣ Questions around polygon definition ‣ Still unable to visualize unless on a map

28. Sharing names ‣ Has the potential to make a connection with users ‣ Distinguishes a “named place” from simply a “place” ‣ Inverse relationship between granularity and connection ‣ Rather large internationalization / context implications

29. Where do you actually “get” location from?

30. Triangulation

31. Triangulation: cellular ‣ 200m to 1km accuracy ‣ Measuring signal strength to cell towers with known locations ‣ If can only see one cellular tower, then fallback to cellular tower identification - better than nothing, but really inaccurate ‣ Requires cellular modem, software, and lookups

32. Triangulation: WiFi ‣ Sub 20m accuracy ‣ Works indoors and in urban areas ‣ Doesn’t need dedicated hardware just a 802.11 radio ‣ Relatively quick time to get a position

33. Triangulation: GPS ‣ Sub 1m accuracy ‣ Need dedicated GPS hardware ‣ Prone to multi-path confusion especially in cities ‣ Needs line of sight to the sky ‣ Doesn’t work well indoors ‣ Potentially takes a few minutes to get a lock

34. Association ‣ IP address to geographical mapping ‣ All done on the server side ‣ Maybe “good” for city level ‣ Maxmind has 83% at 40km ‣ Very error prone ‣ Gets wonky when dealing with cellular connections or rather large ISPs ‣ Database needs to be refreshed fairly frequently

35. Extraction ‣ Read the text and understand intent ‣ Hard to understand whether talking from a place, or about a place ‣ Running text through a geocoder (Google, Yahoo, Geocoder.us) ‣ Parsing structured URLs and then crawling “place pages”

36. Location in browser ‣ Geolocation API Specification for JavaScript navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition ‣ Does a callback with a position object ‣ position.coords has ‣ latitude and longitude ‣ accuracy ‣ other stuff ‣ Support in Firefox 3.5, Chrome, Opera, and others with Google Gears

37. Brokered location

38. Brokered location

39. Working with users

40. Implicit vs Explicit ‣ Do you automatically add location content, or does the user have to explicitly do something? ‣ Because this is a privacy sensitive issue - users want to “be in control”

41. Workflow ‣ Plan for asynchronicity ‣ May need server to do something ‣ May need client to do something ‣ Client may get “streamed” updated information stream to act on ‣ Almost certainly need human intervention ‣ If you have the infrastructure, learn from your users actions

42. Lying is a feature ‣ Not just falsification ‣ Understand if you’re building a “verifiied” location service ‣ Sometimes just want to annotate a comment with a place ‣ “Context” means different things ‣ Making a comment after the fact ‣ Pointing somebody else to a location

43. Privacy ‣ Give the user control ‣ For Twitter, you had to explicitly opt into the feature ‣ We also provide the ability to purge location information ‣ Communicate to the user what’s happening both in the client and the server ‣ Can somebody else tag your house?

44. “What’s happening here?”

45. Original attempts Adding it to the tweet ‣ Use myloc.me, et. al. to add text to the tweet ‣ Localizes mobile phone and puts location “in band” ‣ Takes from 140 characters Setting profile level locations ‣ Set the user/location of a Twitter user ‣ There is an API for that! ‣ Not on a per-tweet basis and not designed for high frequency updates

46. curl -u USERNAME:PASSWORD -d location="San Francisco, California" http://twitter.com/account/update_location.xml <user> <id>8285392</id> <name>raffi</name> <screen_name>raffi</screen_name> <location>San Francisco, California</location> ... </user>

47. Geotagging API

48. Geotagging API Adding it to the tweet ‣ Per-tweet basis ‣ Out of band / pure meta-data ‣ Does not take from the 140 characters Native Twitter support ‣ Simple way to update status with location data ‣ Ability to remove geotags from your tweets en masse ‣ Using GeoRSS and GeoJSON as the encoding format ‣ Across all Twitter APIs (REST, Search, and Streaming)

54. Streaming / Geo-hose location filtering curl "http://stream.twitter.com/1/statuses/filter.xml? locations=-74.5129,40.2759,-73.5019,41.2759" locations is a bounding box specified by “long1,lat1,long2,lat2” and can track up to 10 locations that are most 1 degree square (~60 miles square and enough to cover most metropolitan areas)

55. Trends API

57. Trends API Global trends ‣ Currently on front page of Twitter.com and on search.twitter.com ‣ Analysis of “hot conversations” ‣ Does not take from the 140 characters Location specific trends ‣ Tweets being localized through a variety of means into trends ‣ Locations exposed over the API as WOEIDs ‣ Can ask for available trends sorted by distance from your location ‣ Querying for a parent of a location will return all locations under it

59. Geo-place API ‣ Reverse geocoder to get a list of places that a Tweet can be attached to ‣ Place can then be permanently attached to the Tweet and appears in all APIs ‣ Allows for “location obfuscation”

60. We’re a platform

61. Questions? Follow me at twitter.com/raffi TM

Adding the "Where" to the "When"

Adding the "Where" to the "When"

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