Twitter has already redefined the way the media industry gets and spreads news. So often, major news is broken on Twitter before it reaches any other medium. We recently told you how Twitter was improving its API by changing the ReTweet options. Now, Twitter plans to add geotagging to it’s interface. So now, you can mark the location you are tweeting from. As of now, your current location can be given by changing your Twitter settings, but it’s not exactly reliable. Your custom search option on Twitter Search does allow you to set location settings for tweets, but one trial shows you how much scope there is for development. Hence, this article on how Twitter plans to initiate Geotagging shows that Twitter is thinking about improving the systems.
Around this time last month, we’d covered how Mumbairains was the trending topic on Twitter. Now imagine all those Mumbaikars with mobile phones tweeting how bad the rain was and you’d actually know which areas were flooding. And the potential for development is just beginning. There are several companies who are already working on softwares that have location as an essential tool. They are surely looking at the prospects. PCWorld has their views in this article.
This of course, could give a whole new dimension to social gaming. Imagine playing a game real time by people spread across the city with a maximum permissible number of tweets or interactions with others. The new addition to the Twitter API will give third-party developers a host of options to build on. And with the internet going mobile, the location aspect of tweets will help bridge the gap between offline and online. There also seems to be scope for marketers. Imagine know what time, date and place a person tweets from. Assuming tweeting becomes as popular as the sms, you’ll know which locations people tweet from. Such analytics could help any marketing firm.
Twitter aims to be the pulse of the planet, and know you’ll know which part of the planet voices are emerging from.
