Adding presence-based and location-based capabilities in Twitter
MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVES:
Twitter is a very popular application which provides information about what a person is
doing at a point of time. It has resulted in the "micro blogging" revolution. The advantage
of twitter is that it establishes communication between people without flooding them with
too much information. However, many users would like a little more information about
their friends, for example where they are at a particular time. This can potentially be very
useful, for example in organizing meetings between people. There are instances when we
need to know who amongst our friends are in and around the area that we presently are
in. If there is some service which could tell us where our friends are at a particular time,
without having to call each one of them, it would prove to be very convenient. Our
objective in this project is to add additional useful capabilities to twitter while
maintaining its simplicity.
Moreover, Twitter has the ability to broadcast messages to everyone. This may result in
people getting irrelevant messages without the consideration of the suitability of the
message to them. For example, if a person is in the Georgia Tech cafeteria, he would like
to know if any of his colleagues from Georgia Tech are around the place. Such a person
would like the capability to get the locations for a certain group of people. Twitter can be
made more user friendly by including the concept of groups.
Another way of organizing this presence information would be to have a page associated
with a location with messages from everyone in the area or related to the area. This
would enable people to know more about a location by the kind of people who visit it or
vice versa.
RELATED WORK
Twitter is a free social-networking and micro-blogging service which allows people to
send updates to the Twitter website through short message service (SMS) and instant
messaging. These updates are available on the user's web page. Further, these messages
can be sent to other users using the same services. Twitter has gained a lot of popularity
among technology savvy people as it allows them to stay connected with each other with
relatively minimal effort. Twitter has been mainly marketed as a "What are you doing?"
specific application i.e it allows people to inform other people about what they are doing
at a particular time. There is the potential of adding a lot of other information that friends
may be interested to know about a person. In our project we will be focusing on adding
presence-based and location-based functionality to twitter.
Presence-based applications are applications which allow users to know whether other
users are available for communication. Such applications can be very useful, especially
when meetings need to be set up without prior notice. Through presence-based
applications a meeting organizer can know whether the people with whom he desires to
hold the meeting are available for communication, and if they are, the meeting can be set
up using appropriate means of communication.
Location-based applications use the location of users to answer their queries. Mostly
these queries are queries whose answer in some manner depends upon the location of the
querying user. An example of such a query is - Give me the location of gas stations
present within five miles of my current location. However, location need not necessarily
be used to for answering location specific users. It can be used in a number of other ways,
for example organizing people based upon their more frequently occurring locations. We
plan to explore different aspects of location-based services in our project. There are many
location based applications using GPS and other services in existence which give such
information.
The idea of location based services has been around for more than a decade. Recently,
there has been a lot of interest in location-based services and applications built using
location based services. An example of a location based service application is VZ
navigator provided by Verizon wireless. This service provides customers with maps,
directions and local search abilities. [1] specifically focuses on providing location based
services with web applications. GypSii is a soon to be released location-based social
network targeted specifically at mobile phones.
PROPOSED WORK
1.Introduction of Availability through the use of presence based techniques:Twitter-like
messages will be used to convey the location of users and whether they are available for
further communication. Further these messages can include an associated time interval so
that the location and availability of users within different time intervals can be conveyed.
2. Location Based information through the use of GPS - An application will be developed
that user's location in terms of GPS co-ordinates can be concatenated with the text
messages they send. These co-ordinates can be used to form location-based pages where
the messages of people present at that location can be displayed. The location information
can also be used to display user's update messages on a map at the location where they
are present, so that the messages can be browsed according to the location. The locationbased information can also be used in recommending possible friends along with other
temporal and context data. Similarly, the locations of friends can be used to suggest
places where one might want to visit. Users can also share their location specific
experiences and these can be used to give aggregate location based reviews.
PLAN OF ACTION
Software Platform considerations:
For Maps http://j2memap.landspurg.net/
For LBS
http://www.j2melbs.com/
For social networking interface Twitter API
Hardware
GPS enabled mobile phones
Platform
Windows
Milestones:We plan to first implement setting location as a status message on the social
network.
Milestone 5 March
In the second stage, we would implement organizing contacts to form community and
groups.
Milestone - 20 March
In the third stage, we would implement location-based concept by storing a page for
every location.
Milestone - 10 April
In the fourth stage, we would implement sending messages automatically so that when a
user updates a status message, it is sent to desired group/community.
Milestone - 25 April
EVALUATION AND TESTING METHOD
The server side will be developed on a desktop computer. The client side application will
be developed on a mobile emulator with GPS functionalty, for example GPS.net. Finally
it will be ported to a real mobile phone and evaluated for each of the added functionalities
with real profile settings and queries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
`
1) Mureson O., Gavrea B., Gorgan D. TUGIS - Location Based Services in Web
Applications. IEEE Conference on Automation, Quality and Testing, 2006
2) Twitter Website
http://twitter.com//
3) Twitter Applications/Wiki
http://twitter.pbwiki.com/Apps
4) "Real-Time Presence-Based Applications", White Paper, Sun Microsystems, 2003
5) Singh, Vishal Kumar; Schulzrinne, Henning; Boni, Piotr; Elman, Boris; Kenneson,
David, "Presence Aware Location-Based Service For Managing Mobile
Communications",
Consumer Communications and Networking Conference, 2007. CCNC 2007. 4th IEEE,
Volume , Issue , Jan. 2007 Page(s):514 - 519
6) "Presence-based Services Demo", Presentation by IBM Telecommunications
Industry
7) OpenSocial API and Documentation
http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/
8)RESEARCH OF LBS BASED ON JAVA AND AN APPLICATION SOLUTION
http://isprs-wgii1.casm.ac.cn/source/RESEARCH%20OF%20LBS%20BASED%20ON%20JAVA%20A
ND%20AN%20APPLICATION%20SOLUTION.pdf