I had my first opportunity yesterday to play around with the GeoAPI geo-referencing service. Although not quite as intuitive as Google Map’s forward and reverse geocoding services, GoeAPI gives you immediate access to geo-located feeds from Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, plus the ability to create custom neighborhoods (what they called “guids”) for you to query.

Sounds nerdy – so here’s the English translation:

You now can, with a few lines of code, get Tweets happening real-time in your neighborhood.

Fun? I guess it depends on where you live. Mostly what I’ve been finding is that my neighbors are kind of pervs.

Here’s a quick and dirty Python code sample for you to get started. You’ll need your own API key first.

Also, you’ll need to know the latitude and longitude of a point in the neighborhood you’re interested in. Try (37.766 -122.417) for the Mission. Also, because sometimes you get garbage for location data (like Where: !!!!Frisco U noe!!!!), I’ve add a quick parser to find correctly formatted latitude and longitude pairs. Plenty more you can do with this with a few minutes of time.

– Nerdy Part –

import sys, os, json, urllib, re

#usage: python get_tweets.py [lat] [lng]

lat = sys.argv[1]
lng = sys.argv[2]

# Regex to find properly formatted lat-long pairs in the where response.

lat_lng_re = re.compile('^[\D]*[^-^\d](?P[\d\.-]+)\s*\,\s*(?P[\d\.-]+).*')
api = '[YOUR API KEY]'

parent_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/parents?lat=%s&lon=%s&apikey=%s' % (lat,lng,api)
response = urllib.urlopen(parent_request).read()

json1 = json.loads(response)

# Find your neighborhood 

guid = json1['result']['parents'][0]['guid']
print "\n\nYour neighborhood: %s\n\n" % json1['result']['parents'][0]['meta']['name']
print "--TWEETS--\n\n"

# Get Tweets in your neighborhood

tweets_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/e/%s/view/twitter?apikey=%s' % (guid,api)

response = urllib.urlopen(tweets_request).read()

json2 = json.loads(response)

for tweet in json2['result']:
	print "Tweet: %s" % tweet['text']
	print "When: %s" % tweet['created_at']
	loc = lat_lng_re.match(tweet['location'])
	if loc:
		print "Lat: %s Lng: %s" % (loc.group('lat'),loc.group('lng'))
	else:
		print "Unusable location: %s" % tweet['location']
	print "User: %s" % tweet['from_user']
	print "Profile image url: %s\n" % tweet['profile_image_url']

The backstory: I took a spur-of-the-moment trip to Nevada last July Fourth, and wound up in Virginia City on a lark.  Turns out they’re really into our nation’s birthday there (a guy at a biker bar told me that they are, quote, America Friendly, unquote, in the VC), and go all out with the historical costumes and country music or whatever.

Also, the geniuses at Schnap found my picture on Flickr.  Cheers.

For those of you who use Adobe Lightroom to manage your pictures (I’m a big fan), I’ve found this solution.  It gives you (almost) all the flexibility you need to process and rename images and, best of all, hasn’t crashed on me yet.