The #ull2arwich map
Posted by stevieflow | Filed under ull2arwich
Over Easter we got on our bikes and cycled from Hull to the Essex port of Harwich. The long weekend, plus loved ones being elsewhere, meant David and I were OK to sit on our bikes for up to 11 hours a day (the headwind through Lincolnshire..).
Our tweetmap
On previous bike rides I’ve normally taken a Garmin GPS device and also had a camera. On this one however, we thought it would be interesting to try and utilise the GPS capabilities of my Nolia E71 phone and use my Twitter as a means to collect data. The end result could/would/should be a map and timeline of the bike ride…
Knowing that we could manually read the lat/long from my phone and then tweet this out was useful – and so we made a couple of tests. However, we also knew that to effectively aggregate the tweets, it would be easier to look at delivering the geo coordinates via the specific Twitter fields and functions, rather than the 140 characters of the message.
The first step was to install a Twitter client to the E71 that could do this. I had tried Gravity before at conferences and found it really useful – so looked into that. Gravity has a neat function to enable the GPS coordinates to be sent with any particular tweet, along with photos and images via Twitpic and other services. Finally, we figured that a hashtag was needed to group the tweets together – hence the very particular #ull2arwich term.
So – with the platform and device together, onto the ride! As you can see from the map, I managed to send messages out, with pics, along the way. A couple of tweets seemed to misplace, which was a bit annoying – particularly for the final one at Harwich quay!
Overall, the experience of using the phone/Gravity/Twitter was pleasurable. In a few remote (or cloudy?) areas, the GPS didnt seem to locate, but generally it was all OK. Just don’t ask about that headwind in south Lincolnshire 
My favourite photo along the way – roadside art
Our app idea hatched along the way – egg-o-meter
May 5, 2010 at 10:56 am
As the other rider, my perspective is:
The phone did seem to take a long time to geo-locate, so a simple tweet could easily take 5mins – not quite the point of short, sharp messages – but stopping on a bike to do anything seems to take time.
If we hadn’t been doing this, would we have stopped as often, or taken as many pictures? Maybe with just a camera, we would have had more photos and less tweets.
Another way to document the ride would have been a blog at the end of each day, but I’m glad we didn’t do that, as I think that may have felt laborious.
And did anyone follow us? Well a couple of people were interested, but then again ain’t that twitter for ya!