geotwitta lets you see how far you are from other twitter users running the program. It will post to your twitter account letting you know the distance in kilometers from those users. It is based on a bunch of technologies I wanted to try out. As a result it is somewhat over-engineered for what it does. For those that are interested it uses Guile to script a binary network protocol that happens to be encoded efficiently over UDP packets.
It is a command line program. An example of usage is:
geotwitta -u foo -p bar --lat=55.55 --long=-0.25
This would authenticate against the Twitter account ‘foo’ with password ‘bar’ and ping in those coordinates. These account details are only exchanged securely with Twitter and not sent over the network protocol. The protocol also does not provide coordinates back of other users. It simply shows a relative distance. The full source of the client is available. If there is an interest I will also tidy up the server code and release it.
To get started you need two packages: The program itself and the Guile module which does the network protocol work. The following tarballs are availble for those who want to build from source.
http://zedstar.org/tarballs/packedobjects-0.1.tar.gz
http://zedstar.org/tarballs/geotwitta-0.1.tar.gz
http://zedstar.org/tarballs/geotwitta-0.2.tar.gz
Untar and do the usual ./configure… routine. The configure script will let you know which dependencies are required to compile. If you don’t feel like building from source I have also built some Debian packages. I have tested these on Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex).
http://zedstar.org/deb/packedobjects_0.1-1_i386.deb
http://zedstar.org/deb/geotwitta_0.1-1_i386.deb
http://zedstar.org/deb/geotwitta_0.2-1_i386.deb
If you manage to get the software running I will see you on Twitter!
All the usual disclaimers about the software apply.
**update**
Version 0.2 of geotwitta added: ignores UDP packet loss on pings