Twitter getting sensitive about your location

Posted on 21-08-2009

As if we already don't know enough! Soon Twitter will be overloading you with another piece of information, the "location" of your tweets.

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GPS is getting increasingly integrated into our lives, and has had some brilliant applications in cameras and mobiles, by providing location sensitive services we couldn't have thought of before. No longer do we associate the GPS with noble causes such as finding your way out of a desert. No, today we can use the GPS to crash parties by seeing how many of our friends collect in a single location on Google Latitude.

So with Twitter introducing support for location metadata, we will surely find some amazing applications. With the new metadata tags, you can now know not only who is sending the tweets, but from where, so you can laugh at a friend who tweets "The Shammi Kabab in Taj Palace are TO DIE FOR" while sitting in "Kake da Dhaba" around the corner.

The feature will be opened for developers to use and integrate into their apps before coming out in Twitter's mobile, and desktop websites, thus making sure all Twitter applications support it before unveiling it to the public.

The feature will be off by default, probably due to privacy concerns, and since GPS is still not ubiquitous. If people opt to turn it on though, each tweet will now be loaded with even more information.

Among the possibilities of such a feature, the two listed on their blog post announcing the feature make the case quite well, a concert and an earthquake, if one doesn't cause the other.

This could add some interesting new ways to find information which is location centric. Twitter will almost certainly allow for searching for tweets by location, follow the tweets happening around you perhaps, they have already shown their interest in searching tweets with their recent redesign. All in all an incredibly useful feature, which comes just in time to enjoy the rise of location sensitive computing.