Geo-Tagged Tweets and Twitter API

Question

When I do a timeline query using the Twitter API...

http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline.xml?screen_name=MyTwitterName

The geographic component of the reply looks like this:

<geo><georss:point>49.13786075 -122.85811069</georss:point></geo>

<coordinates><georss:point>49.13786075 -122.85811069</georss:point></coordinates>

Does anyone know the difference between the geo and coordinates tags? I did look in the Twitter docs but couldn't see anything. Should it always have both, or is one preferred to another?

Answer 1

From what I can tell, in older versions of the API, geo returns latitude,longitude and coordinates returned longitude,latitude. But since switching to georss, those should be the same consistently. This question on SO has some background about the different names.