Over on The Inquisitr, blogger Steven Hodson noticed how a Wired article was making use of the new Twitter integration feature in Bing Maps beta. At the end of the story about Twitter usage in Haiti, the article linked to a Bing map showing some of the tweets from the area. This was made possible by way of the “mapplications” feature launched in early December which allows Bing Maps users to see real-time updates from the microblogging network placed on a map corresponding to the tweets’ originating location. In this case, you can see the tweets from Haiti as they occur.
Unfortunately, though, few users have activated the geolocation feature in Twitter which makes locating tweets like this possible. The problem appears to be related to the fact that geolocation is switched off by default, requiring Twitter users to enter into their account settings in order to turn it out. Also, many Twitter clients don’t support the feature yet, either. And, as Martin Bryant points out on The Next Web, even those that do require you to manually enable it while also turning the setting on at Twitter.com, a configuration process that many don’t seem to understand. Hopefully Twitter can come up with a way to make this process simpler for users in the future so we can take advantage of all that geolocation makes possible, including this Twitter mapplication in Bing.
