Twitter as a tool

Twitter is cool. Really, I love Twitter. I tend to use it as a way of showing where I am or what I'm doing. What I want to see from someone is some sort of tracker. Integrate Twitter with Google Maps, or better yet, Google Earth. Allow Twitter users to use a #location tag for their Twitters and put in their geographic location, town or zip code. Then the location needs to be found as a latitude and longitude. For this I would use yahoo's geo-coding tool which give you the data as xml. Then plot these points on Google Earth/Maps.

Ok, no you are wondering what use that would have. Imagine that I am a company that has sales people traveling all over the world. I get a customer that is in Zimbabwe, I want to find who I have that is the closest. This would work as a nice visual way of checking. To me that would be cool.

Now, this wouldn't be hard to implement, actually I've said most everything needed to do it. Throw it all into a php page and its mostly done. The only thing that php lacks is an effective and simple xml parser that parses it into an associative array.