This is a copy of a blog I authored over on the Coastal Walkabout site at www.coastalwalkabout.org.

The Coastal Walkabout version 1.2 Apps are just hitting the Android Play and iTunes stores at the moment.

This new release includes some changes that have been made to the performance of the App, but the main change that people will see with the new version of the App is the social media component.

This new functionality allows for people to publicise that they have added sightings to Coastal Walkabout through either their own Facebook or Twitter accounts.  This doesn’t publish the details of the upload, but provides a link back to the main data screens on the Coastal Walkabout web page.

This is important for the project as this sort of publicity will attract more people to the project.  Of course, you can press the “Done” button and not share it on Facebook or Twitter, it’s totally at the discretion of each person using the App.

On both iOS and Android versions, you must have the official Facebook or Twitter app installed and you must be logged into these apps.  The Coastal Walkabout App will give you directions if your phone is not correctly set up already.

We can also provide some details of the new Twitter Harvester that runs silently in the back of the Coastal Walkabout infrastructure.  This means that Coastal Walkabout now watches Twitter for posts about species sightings!

To contribute a sighting via Twitter, all you need to do is to publish a tweet that includes:

1. A species name, scientific or common name that exists in the coastal walkabout survey. The name has to be a match with the species we have included in the project!
2. A set of coordinates for the location (which you would normally turn on within your mobile twitter App) OR a ‘place’ e.g. Tokyo, Japan, which would only be possible via the Twitter web browser interface.
3. Most importantly, the #coastalwalkabout hashtag.

These tweets are collected every hour and stored within a specific area in the Coastal Walkabout infrastructure, but they also become available to be seen on the main map of all of the sightings at http://coastalwalkabout.gaiaresources.com.au/wordpress/data/.

We are seeing a lot of interest in Coastal Walkabout from people all around the world, and we’re seeing sightings starting to come in all around Australia, and even some sightings from other parts of the world!

Piers

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