June 15, 2010 by Jenny Sanderson
Twitter has just announced that they have developed an evolved version of their Tweeting service, which enables Twitter users to update their location automatically when they post a tweet to the site.
With the new feature, updates will now reveal the location of the person who posted the status update. It will be enabled for Twitter Web and Twitter’s Mobile Web capability. When a reader wishes to find out where the post was sent from, they simply click on the link in the tweet which points to ‘Twitter Place’.
Twitter has designed the new functionality to provide more context for tweets, and offer more capability for online social networking. Now, if a group of people are all located within the same area (such as at a football match, concert or theatre performance), they will be able to click on the Twitter Place link to see all the most recent tweets being sent from that location. This means that festivals, holidays or events will now have an additional form of media coverage, created by social networking.
The API functionality behind the idea has now been made available to developers, so that it can be integrated in to programmes. With the exception of Firefox and Chrome, all platforms should be supporting the new functionality.
Twitter is becoming one of the most popular ways for people to keep friends and business associates updated, in just a few characters.
The nature of the site means that busy internet users need spend less time on status updates, and have the functionality to ‘tweet’ in a matter of seconds. The new feature allowing Place updates will revolutionise the site to some extent, as it provides geographical background to users and readers. This functionality will make it easier to locate potential new business prospects, target new and existing customers, and enable natural geographical groups to form through online networking.
Twitter Places will be rolled out in 65 countries, next week.
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