X Marks the Spot

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The Twitter Advanced Search Dialog allows to search by city, for example, “San Francisco, CA” – but did you know you can search for a (Latitude, Longitude) location with a radius as small as 0.01 miles?

To find the (Latitude, Longitude) for a spot on the map, right-mouse-click in Google Maps and choose “What’s There?”. As an example, I have copied the numbers for a popular conference and trade-show site in San Francisco, Moscone Center. They are: 37.783256, -122.403952.

If, in the Advanced Twitter Search, we look for locations “near San Francisco, with a radius of 0.005 miles, we will see this syntax:

[ near:”San Francisco, CA” within:0.05mi ]

Now I can replace the City name in this Twitter search string by the (Latitude, Longitude). Let’s also add a keyword, Apple, to look for events involving Apple. Here is the resulting search:

This search is looking for tweets from Moscone Center with the keyword Apple – naturally, results are from Apple’s major developer conference held there, WWDC.

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