Got inspired by Twittervision mapping your tweets on Google Map. They don’t have a widget to put the map on your blog. Nevertheless I wouldn’t have used their widgets as they slow down the site. I hacked a piece of code in php/js to achieve the same on my site.

Geo microformat L:lat,lan is used to represent the position data. It takes 21 characters to represent my geo location accurately. 21 characters out of 140 characters is high but its worth when you are traveling. Its very interesting to see tweets of your travel time on map.

As of now it shows only the latest tweet on the map¹. My next idea is to show multiple tweets on the map. Allow user to choose the number of tweets. That will be cool when I am traveling specially after buying this gps logger (Thanks to Sunish).

I am also using hashtags to tag my tweets which will help me to fetch the tweets related to a context. So using hashtags I can map related tweets on the map. Think of looking at all my missionkk tweets on the map. That will be great right?

The project is called WWW- When Where What and the url is http://thejeshgn.com/www/. Have a look and let me know.

[1] If a tweet doesn’t have geo info it will pointed to my home.

Looks like bollywood is slowly has started getting what web2.0 can do for them. Few days back at Filmcamp myself and Sanjay Jha had a long discussion about bollywood and blogging. How much it can cut the PR and newspapers? How much near it can bring the actor to his fans? I have been reading Aamir Khan’s blog ever since he started to blog. I have been his blog’s biggest fan. Of course Aamir was the starting point of my and Sanjay’s discussion ( BTW we met Sanjay on LinkedIn- How cool is that).

I had this dream of Aamir twittering about his life/work. I had left a comment on one of his blog post too. I am not sure if he read it. But looks like Saawariya team picked it up. It was a shocker when EventsBangalore got followed by somebody named Saawariya. Well I did not believe until I got a confirmation.

I am happy to see a main stream movie team picking up non-main stream method to give the details about the movie. Now I don’t have to send an SMS to one of those costly NUMBERS to get updates. All I have to do is follow saawariya on twitter. I get all those tweets on to my mobile. This might be that one reason for me to watch Saawariaya instead of OSO

Last few days me and my friends where trying to setup a twitter channel for our group. We wanted this one to be personal sms chat group. All group members will get the tweets posted to this channel.They will also be able to post tweets to group. And as far as possible outsider should not be able to get any tweets. And 100% no spamming by outsider. Yesterday we finalized our solution. This may not be the best way to do it. But it works (it has its own problems too). In this solution we use twitter and third party services but we have not coded a single line of code. And hence it is for non geeks too. Here are the steps:

• Setup a twitter account and make tweets private. This is our channel tweet from whom we will be getting tweets.
• Get the direct message atom feed. This is not straight you need to use their api url. You can get the feed using the url below. Note the password and userid are part of url. Not the safest way but it works. http://userid:password@twitter.com/direct_messages.atom
• Now feed this to twitterfeed.com to msg to channel as soon as possible. TwitterFeed is a service which takes a feed and posts the title and content as tweet to a given id.
• To get the messages from the channel follow the channel.
• To post the messages you need to send a direct message to channel and for that channel should be following you. So ask the admin of channel to add you as a friend.
• Now just send a d channel message to send the message to the group

Known problems:

• Messages are delayed by half an hour because twitterfeed wakes up only at half an hour interval.
• The broadcast messages does not have the senders id. So the sender has to identify himself seaparately.
• May not be the safest way to implement a channel

What next:
Use the twitter Apis and write your own mashup do the same in a better way. Thanks to anarahari for the implementation and testing. wesleyneo and prsn for all the brainstorming tweets.

Further read:
Refer Twitter Fan Wiki for other API implementations and projects and here is the proposal for the twitter channel tag.

I was fully connected through out my bike ride to Kanyakumari from Bangalore. I used GPRS to twitter my travel and communicate with my friends. These tweets give the details about where/what/when. A proper blog post with pics is coming. Until then enjoy the tweets.

• i hope it will stop raining tomorrow. is it raining in tamil nadu ? 06:21 PM August 10, 2007
• last twitter marked the begining of missionkk twittering. 06:27 PM August 10, 2007
• waiting for mk and Boda to arrive. it has stopped raining now. 06:45 PM August 10, 2007
• got a chain and lock to lock vehicles together. 07:04 PM August 10, 2007
• all packed. going to sleep now. need to get up at 3 am 11:55 PM August 10, 2007
• dosa at saravana bhavan tastes good 08:43 AM August 11, 2007
• we are behind the schedule by an hour 08:45 AM August 11, 2007

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