Twitter users can specifiy their location in their profile. Everyone is free to specify whatever he or she wants. You can put a genuine location, you can put a fake location, you can put a phrase or you can leave it empty.
About 60% of a large set of Twitter users known to Twitterfacts mention "something" as their location. This "something" is in most cases useful to determine the location of the Twitter user. Others however make it a little bit difficult :
A little town in Europa,
Around the world,
Probably on a plane,
Changes weekly!,
on a magical island,
everywhere...and nowhere....,
with the penguins,
behind enemy lines,
Betcha wish you were here!,
dark side of the moon,
localhost,
None of your damned business!,
Not sure- i'll get back to you,
Secluded cement bunker,
That's a good question. Ask me
and finally also in Twitterville.
Some locations specificied by Twitter users confuse the geo-mashup services mapping Twitter users or Twitter messages to geographical locations. We can savely assume that location "SF" stands for "San Francisco". Location "SL" refers probably to "Second Life". Twittermaps plots Twitter users with location "SL" however in Sierra Leone, Africa - have a look at this example.
"AND" is the official country code for Andorra, a mini state in Europe. All Twitter users with a location consisting of a short phrase that starts with "And " are from Andorra according to Twittermaps (and Twittervision) - see this this example.
Twitter users who start there location with "ER " (especially German and Dutch speaking users, see this example) end up in Eritrea, also in Africa.
Exploring locations of Twitter users will let you explore our whole world, from the North Pole to Antartica.
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