Fail: Twitter Location Divining

Twitter Updates

HashTags

#PKNsf
San Francisco PechaKucha Night
#IXDAsf
San Francisco IxDA

Blogroll

Twitter.com Hey Twitter! I love the idea of being able to tag my current location in the Web interface, but it has a serious flaw.

Your code assumes that it knows where I am better than I do, and provides no way for me to correct it.

I am firmly ensconced in the center of Foster City, the HQ location of Visa, Sony Computer Entertainment of America, and a few other notable companies. Yet Twitter is convinced I’m in San Mateo. Foster City appears nowhere on its pull-down list, and when I click the little x to delete my location, I’m greeted with a link to “add your location”, which promptly decides that I am in “Downtown, San Mateo”. 🙁

Where is the field for me to enter my own city name? Or to enter GPS coordinates? Or to even tell you that your suggested list is missing cities it should have?

Update

The location feature also seems to fail when you’re behind a firewall. If twitter can’t automatically determine my location, why can’t I enter it manually?

Again, the place I’m tweeting from isn’t that backward a location. 94010 may not have quite the same recognition as 90210, but the two cities it represents aren’t too far behind in wealth or famous residents.

Update 2

No, twitter, I’m not anywhere near “Washington Mall, Washington”, but the corporate firewall I’m going through is within a 2 block radius of that. And are you sure that there isn’t a “Washington Mall, WA”? Is it too much to ask for the additional 4 characters it would take to say “Washington Mall, Washington, DC”?

Author: Peter Sheerin

Peter Sheerin is best known for the decade he spent as the Technical Editor of CADENCE magazine, where he was the acknowledged expert in Computer-Aided Design hardware and software. He has a long-standing passion for improving usability of software, hardware, and everyday objects that is always interwoven in his articles. Peter is available for freelance technical writing and product reviews, and is exploring career opportunities in interaction design. His pet personal project is exploring the best ways to harmonize visual, tactile, and audible symbols for improving the effectiveness of alerting systems.

Leave a Reply