Communications of the ACM
Mapping the Twitterverse
Researchers are studying how the public geospatial data generated by Twitter users could be used by third parties.
Credit: Simonmainwaring.com
University of Southern California (USC) researchers are studying how much public geospatial data is generated by Twitter users and how that information could be used by third parties.
Twitter has about 500 million active users, and reports show that about 6 percent opt in to allow the platform to broadcast their location using global positioning system (GPS) technology, for a total of about 30 million users sending geo-tagged data.
"There is all sorts of information that can be gleaned from things outside of the tweet itself," says USC's Chris Weidemann, who developed the Twitter2GIS app, which analyzes the geospatial data that Twitter users generate.
Twitter2GIS uses Twitter's application programming interface (API) and Google's Geocoding API to collect tweets from either geographic regions or a specific Twitter user.
During a sampling period, an average of 4 million Twitter users revealed their physical locations through GPS coordinates or other active location monitoring, and corporations could potentially build profiles of individuals for marketing purposes with such information.
Weidemann is expanding the app to enable Twitter users to log in with their profile credentials and view their Twitter geospatial footprint.
From USC Dornsife
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Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
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