The Twitter founder Biz Stone has written in his blog that Twitter will soon include support for geo-location based information in the tweets. However, this new feature will be optional and it will give users of Twitter the option to include their GPS location in their tweets.
This new feature will make Twitter location-aware. The new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. The users will need to activate this new feature by choice since it will be off by default and moreover, the exact location data of the user won’t be stored for an extended period of time. This optional choice will perhaps take care of the privacy concerns of the users of Twitter.
At present, a user normally reads the tweets of the Twitter accounts which he follows. However, with this new accurate and tweet-level location data, a user could switch to reading tweets from anyone in his neighborhood or city irrespective of whether he follows them or not. He will also perhaps be able to select to read tweets of any particular city or area once he knows about the latitude or longitude of that city or area, or perhaps Twitter will offer more user-friendly way to locate tweets from a particular city or area. This new feature could be quite useful at the time of occurrence of an important event at a place including some concert or some calamities such as an earthquake or a terror attack. There could possibly be many other uses including location-driven advertisements in future.
It may be mentioned that at present a user of Twitter can mention his location in the settings of his user account. However, it is optional and moreover, one is not sure whether a user has mentioned his correct location as there is no system to cross-check it and the user can write anything for the location. However, with this new geo-location feature, once a user opts to include his location, his location at the time tweeting a particular tweet could be automatically found by the API which is expected to be accurate or at least reasonably accurate.
It is pertinent to point out that many web-service providers have been taking interest in developing geo-location based web-services. Recently, Google had added support for geo-location in its mobile search engine. Google Latitude, which is also geo-location enabled, allows you to follow your contacts in real-time within Google Maps. In the latest version 3.5 of Firefox, geo-location support has been added. Facebook is also on its way to add geo-location support in coming months.
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