Local Twitter Search

Last night we launched a local operator for our twitter search, enabling you to search within tweets near a location.  For example, you can find what people are saying about Obama near:oregon while he campaigns there.  The easiest way to find this operator is to use our advanced search page, there you will see an input box with "near this place."  Just fill it in with your city, state, zip, etc. along with what you are looking for.  Adam Ostrow and Danny Sullivan have already done a great job of reviewing this feature, but we wanted to provide some clarification here about exactly how it works. 

For this initial version, we've focused on the "location" field of your twitter profile to determine where you are.  Twitter recently released an API allowing this field to be dynamically updated.  We rely on the Google Maps API to interpret (or "geocode") this free-text location as an actual place that can be put on a map.  We also rely on the level of accuracy they report to determine whether the locations of tweets are accurate enough to be displayed at the zoom level you're viewing.  So if you don't see what you expect, especially in China, zoom out!

Brightkite recently provided users an option to update their twitter location.  As more Twitter clients integrate accurate location updating into their interfaces, these results will get better and better.  For those that already have more precise location data, we accept exact decimal latitude, longitude values in the location field, i.e. "44.145447,-120.583402"  You can also put these exact locations in individual tweets, overriding whatever is in your profile by using the picoformat "L:44.145447,-120.583402"  Dan Catt wrote a great blog post about how one might automatically update their Twitter profile with exact locations by mashing up existing location API's.

Finally, our local search is available in our API to mash up with your favorite Twitter apps.  However, you must provide the exact lattitude, longitude that you are searching from using the "geocode" query parameter, instead of specifying a place name with "near".