The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20120809033651/https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/9267

Streaming API returns many tweets without geo info

epomqo
@epomqo Xiaowen Dong

Dear all,

I have been collecting all geo-tagged tweets in center London by using Twitter's Streaming API service with a predefined bounding box. However, I have observed that out of all the tweets that I received every month, there are probably 30%-40% of them which actually do not contain the desired geo information - the 'geo' field is either 'null' or falling outside the predefined bounding box.

Does anyone experience the same? Is this considered normal in the usage of the Streaming API?

Many thanks,
epomqo

3 weeks 5 days ago

Replies

epomqo
@epomqo Xiaowen Dong

No one experienced the same problem? :(

I have searched through the discussions and it seems that the main problem people encountered before is the geo info contained in the tweets being out of the predefined bounding box.

2 weeks 1 day ago
me_bx
@me_bx Mehdi El Fadil

Hi epomqo,

You should find a "place" field whenever "geo" is missing. This is because some users do not provide their exact location, but only tell the city, region or country where they are.

In twitter's REST API, you can find the polygon and bounding box coordinates for most of the "places".

Hope this helps,

mehdi.

2 weeks 10 hours ago
epomqo
@epomqo Xiaowen Dong

Mehdi, thanks for the answer!

However, I thought the location parameter in the Streaming API only filter the tweets according to the bounding box assigned by the parameters, as said in the documentation: "unlike the Search API, the user’s location field is not used to filter tweets."

So I assume that theoretically every tweet returned by the Streaming API should have the GPS coordinates that fall into the predefined bounding box, am I right?

Thanks,
epomqo

1 week 6 days ago