Tweets Will Soon Come With a Dateline

Tweets Will Soon Come With a Dateline
By Claire Cain Miller
Copyright by The New York Times
August 20, 2009, 5:42 pm
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/20/tweets-will-soon-come-with-a-dateline/?th&emc=th


Tweets, those short messages that pack information into 140 characters, will soon include another piece of information: location.

Twitter is getting ready to unveil a new feature that will add longitude and latitude to any tweet. Individual Twitter users will have the choice to activate this feature and Twitter promises it won’t store exact location data for a long period of time.

There are a bunch of possible uses for location-aware tweets. With this new feature, Twitter users — many of whom use the service from their phones while on the move — could choose to view all the tweets written by people in their city, neighborhood or building, for example. In a post on the company blog, Biz Stone, a Twitter founder, suggested that the feature would be particularly useful for people following an event like a concert or an earthquake.

The feature could also have interesting commercial purposes, especially since Twitter plans to eventually make money by offering special services to businesses that use it. A small business on Twitter could potentially use the location feature to reach out to local customers, or a Twitter user hungry for pizza could search for nearby pizza joints offering specials, for example.

Though Mr. Stone did not mention such business uses, he wrote, “There will likely be many use cases we haven’t even thought of yet, which is part of what makes this so exciting.”

Twitter will first offer the location feature to developers, who can create applications using Twitter. Later, it will add the feature to Twitter’s main site for all users.

Some Twitter application developers have already been using location of individual Twitter users, though they have been using the locations that people fill out as part of their profiles, in which people can write anything.