Twitter Geo Tagging - twitter

Question

I am trying to download tweets from the London area using
curl --user xx:xx -X POST -d 'locations=-0.651,51.208,0.425,51.781' https://stream.twitter.com/1.1/statuses/filter.json > twitter.london.json
I am getting tweets that are way off. For example in (-6.71658144,50.48812681). Why is that?
The tweet:
{
"created_at": "Mon Apr 08 12:26:40 +0000 2013",
"id": 321237656321286144,
"id_str": "321237656321286144",
"text": "4dc9c54f70000000",
"source": "\u003ca href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003eGoogle\u003c\/a\u003e",
"truncated": false,
"in_reply_to_status_id": null,
"in_reply_to_status_id_str": null,
"in_reply_to_user_id": null,
"in_reply_to_user_id_str": null,
"in_reply_to_screen_name": null,
"user": {
"id": 61043461,
"id_str": "61043461",
"name": "GooGuns",
"screen_name": "googuns_prod",
"location": "",
"url": null,
"description": null,
"protected": false,
"followers_count": 86,
"friends_count": 0,
"listed_count": 2,
"created_at": "Tue Jul 28 22:49:22 +0000 2009",
"favourites_count": 0,
"utc_offset": -18000,
"time_zone": "Eastern Time (US & Canada)",
"geo_enabled": true,
"verified": false,
"statuses_count": 417708,
"lang": "en",
"contributors_enabled": false,
"is_translator": false,
"profile_background_color": "C0DEED",
"profile_background_image_url": "http:\/\/a0.twimg.com\/images\/themes\/theme1\/bg.png",
"profile_background_image_url_https": "https:\/\/si0.twimg.com\/images\/themes\/theme1\/bg.png",
"profile_background_tile": false,
"profile_image_url": "http:\/\/a0.twimg.com\/sticky\/default_profile_images\/default_profile_3_normal.png",
"profile_image_url_https": "https:\/\/si0.twimg.com\/sticky\/default_profile_images\/default_profile_3_normal.png",
"profile_link_color": "0084B4",
"profile_sidebar_border_color": "C0DEED",
"profile_sidebar_fill_color": "DDEEF6",
"profile_text_color": "333333",
"profile_use_background_image": true,
"default_profile": true,
"default_profile_image": true,
"following": null,
"follow_request_sent": null,
"notifications": null
},
"geo": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [50.48812681, -6.71658144]
},
* * "coordinates": {
"type": "Point",
"coordinates": [-6.71658144, 50.48812681]
},
* * "place": {
"id": "6416b8512febefc9",
"url": "http:\/\/api.twitter.com\/1\/geo\/id\/6416b8512febefc9.json",
"place_type": "country",
"name": "United Kingdom",
"full_name": "United Kingdom",
"country_code": "GB",
"country": "United Kingdom",
"contained_within": [],
"geometry": null,
"polylines": [],
"bounding_box": {
"type": "Polygon",
"coordinates": [
[
[-8.662663, 49.1626564],
[-8.662663, 60.86165],
[1.768926, 60.86165],
[1.768926, 49.1626564]
]
]
},
"attributes": {}
},
"contributors": null,
"retweet_count": 0,
"favorite_count": 0,
"entities": {
"hashtags": [],
"urls": [],
"user_mentions": []
},
"favorited": false,
"retweeted": false,
"filter_level": "medium",
"lang": "en"
}

Answer 1

According to the Twitter documentation, the location parameter accepts a comma separated list of longitude,latitude pairs specifying a set of bounding boxes.
If you just pass in a single latitude and longitude, then it will return the nearest Tweets to that location. Have you also specified a filter query, if so this will be massively cutting down the number of Tweets returned, meaning that the closest Tweet to London, is actually miles away. I had a similar problem.
Having said that, I just tried this out, if you use the lat and lon below, with NO other filter queries it works well.
{locations: [51.50,0.12,51.75,1.25]}
Another point to note, is that not a lot of Tweets actually have locations attached anymore, and often the ones which do are very inaccurate as they can actually be coming from the authors home location specified on their profile.