How To Locate and Meet Up With Your Buddies Using the Twitter iPhone App’, GeoTweeter.
GeoTweeter takes the already common practice of using Twitter to inform your friends of your current location, but adds one hugely significant feature…
It actually shows them how to get to you!
How often do you see folks using Twitter to invite their friends out for a coffee?
Normally with a tweet something like “I’m at Costa! Come join me!”.
But which Costa do they mean?
The one on the High Street or that new one by.. hang on, where’s that other one again?
Now you got to go through Google Maps looking for a costa coffee shop and writing down the address.
Worst still you are going to have to rely on archaic technology and use your phone to actually call your friend to check you’re heading to the right place.
GeoTweeter will take away all of those extra steps for you by pulling all the information needed to meet up with some one into one, simple Twitter iPhone application.
When you want to have invite your friends to join you for a night on the town (or for whatever other reason you may want to broadcast your exact location via Twitter), you just open GeoTweeter and blast out your tweet.
GeoTweet will create a schmap.me map pointing at your current GPS location (or any other location you choose) then and add the URL of the map onto the end of your tweet.
These maps are viewable from just about any browser, with special optimizations for BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson, and of course the iPhone.
On some of these platforms, tapping the address on the page will automatically launch the handset’s built-in mapping software, allowing you to navigate to the location without copy and paste or the so out dated, pen and paper.
I love the fact you can also store your regular locations for quick use later, helps hugely if you are inviting people down the local for a “quick” drink regularly.
For added fun or to entice your freinds to join you, you can also include a photo of your current location.
You will still need another Twitter application on your iPhone for general use.
But this makes perfect sense. After all, you don’t always want to be broadcasting your location with every tweet, so you won’t be using GeoTweeter every time anyway.
One thing to watch out for with GeoTweeter is there is no character counter to let you know how many characters you can use before you run out of Tweet space.
Remember; The URL takes up 23 of your 140 characters and the input box will not let you go past the limit (set at 117), but it would handy to have a visual counter for the sake of planning ahead.
Schmap have used all their ingenuity to increase the use of and build upon their Schmap.me service,
GeoTweeter is a genuinely useful service that doesn’t seem tacked on at all.
This is exactly the kind of awesome Twitter iPhone app I love most, yes it’s fun to use, but more importantly it really does an awesome job of helping you connect and interact with other people.
Well done Schmap!