March 17, 2010 by Matt Thomas
As if it wasn’t enough to know exactly what people are doing at any point during the day, Twitter is now going to ensure that we know exactly where they are doing it as well, but I have absolutely no idea why. The Twitter as we know it simply asks you the question “what are you doing?” to which you type your answer, It will now also ask the question “where are you doing it?” but here’s the thing, you do not even have to type the answer as Twitter will already know.
They have this week announced that they will be making a geo-location service available on the site. The ever creative people at Twitter are continuously innovating and changing what you can input into the strict 140 character tweet limit and geo-location is the latest edition. They have already pushed the use of URL shorteners like bit.ly and TinyURL which allow ridiculously long web links to be shortened so that they can fit in a tweet, and the use of hash tags has also taken off. So they thought that it would be good to add the person’s exact location into the tweet as well, but it is questionable just how popular this will be.
Twitter co-founder Biz stone explained the thinking behind the new feature:
“A recent burst of interest in location-sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets,”
Although this may be true it is difficult to think exactly what benefit this feature has apart from informing people that you are not at home, which may not always be wise. The service can be toggled on and off by the user for privacy however, as default it will show the general neighbourhood location that you are in, but if the user chooses it will show the exact street that you are on in a mini-map that comes up next to each of your tweets, scary.
The service will go live this week for those that wish to tell the world exactly what they are doing and where they are doing it.
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