The more I think about Twitter and how it’s continuing to grow in popularity in local areas (like Wilmington, NC for example) the more I realize how Twitter made the “location” part of their profile fairly worthless.
The challenge
If you’ve created a profile on Twitter, you may have noticed that the “location” part of your profile is just an editable textbox – eg: you can put whatever you want in there, even if it’s not a location. While this is great if you don’t feel like putting any personal information (they could have just had it be private data), it makes it a royal pain in the butt when it comes to trying to create accurate and simple localized twitter apps.
A possible solution
As I was thinking about this, I realized possible solution could be to create an API that anyone with an account can tap into (similar to what bit.ly has done with short urls) that provides the location of a user based on the user’s location data. This Twitter Local API would have to have an algorithm to run, and could also hold an index of user’s location (perhaps from crawling various local twitter directories to gather data). The result would ideally be an evolving source of localized information regarding various Twitter users (obviously there would still be some users whose location would be unknown).
The more interesting component of a Twitter Local API would be leveraging it for a strong, successful long-term game. For example: Bit.ly is inevitably building an index of the “live web” among some other interesting moves. The question would thus become, what could a local oriented service leverage, if anything, to make it worthwhile?