Twitter is Becoming Location Aware: Huge Public Health Implications
Cliché introduction alert: Social media offer an opportunity for near-real-time awareness of public health phenomena, including alerts and mapping.
Today, if I were to map the ocurrance of ‘swine flu’ (or “the swine” as it has already become known among students) by tracking tweets, I would be able to see where the tweeters’ accounts were registered, but not where they actually are. So, Bob from Des Moines arrives at school in St. Louis, becomes ill, tweets that he has “the swine,” after failing to update his account information, and the score, erroneously, is Des Moines 1, St. Louis 0.
When you get sick, or are in an earthquake, updating your account information may not be your highest priority.
However, Twitter is in the process of enabling developers to grab the actual location of its users, as long as those users voluntarily enable location awareness. iPhone and other smart-phone users are already familiar with the “____ would like to use your location information” request when they launch a GPS application, for example. Now a Twitter app will be able to make a similar request.
Here’s the Twitter blog entry on the subject: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/08/location-location-location.html
If I were a public health planner, or a public health researcher, I’d be gathering a few of my most creative thinkers to see what sorts of opportunities this might afford. Could we write an auto-responder that would be able to send a direct tweet about nearby resources to anyone posting about having “the swine?” (Don’t get caught up in whether that was a good idea or not; you’ll risk losing focus on this article. Let your people knock it around.) Could we begin developing a textual analysis algorithm that would be highly accurate at determinining whether the tweeter was saying he/she had the disease vs any of the other possible tweets in which one might use the phrase “the swine”? Could we look for others’ work in such textual analysis?
The point is, we are about to have access to a stream of millions of communications that will be able to tell us within, potentially, a few hundred yards, the actual physical location of the originator of that communication. It’s time, past time, actually, to think aggressively about what that stream of information can do for the public health, while equally aggressively respecting the privacy wishes of the tweeters.
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