Last August Twitter announced the launch of a new location sharing feature which allowed users to tag there Tweets with their Geographical location, this was only available as part of the API, until now.
Twitter will be adding the new functionality to its website, allowing Twitter users to tag their Tweets with their location, so what does this mean? Well on the one hand the prospect of real time search results which are based on location does seem very exciting. To be able to monitor and predict trends and public opinion based on location could offer some extremely valuable data. But is this new technology opening up a “Can of Worms”, with personal security potentially at stake, will 2010 be the year of the Stalker? Luckily the new service can only be enabled by physically opting in to location sharing. This will naturally police the situation and should hopefully prevent any potential security issues with location sharing and privacy.
Quite interestingly IE and Safari Users will be disappointed as the new location feature will only work on Firefox and Google Chrome at this time.
“Let’s say I’m at my office and I hear a loud boom. It sounded serious, so I search Twitter for “boom.” Among the first results could be someone who tweeted “Boom go the fireworks!” This could be anywhere in the world. However, if that person had activated the new tweet location feature then the neighbourhood data under the tweet would read, “SoMa.”
Now I know it’s just fireworks going off in my neighbourhood. Boom! Plus, the word “SoMa” is linked to a Google map so I can explore a bit more. There are many ways location data can be useful when paired with tweets.” Taken from the official Twitter blog.
It’s an interesting new technology and we would love to hear your thoughts?
Article by Creative SEO
