Twitter adds geo-tweeting

Where did you say you were?

21 August 2009 2:58 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Twitter is to launch a new feature that will allow developers to add the location of your tweet to your tweet.

"We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware," said Twitter blog stalwart Biz Stone on the company's blog.

The new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude details to any tweet just like geotagging a photo so you know where it was taken.

"Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information," confirmed the company trying to remove any room for privacy concerns.

The company hope that it will allow you to read and find twitterers near you rather than just your friends.

"It's easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake. There will likely be many use cases we haven't even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting," comments Stone.

In related news, Mashable has found that only 35% of tweets come from applications such as tweetdeck and tweetie.

According to research compiled from the last 20 tweets of over 4 million twitter users, a whopping 65% were generated from the twitter website.

Tweetdeck, which has this week won £1.2 in funding from Brent Hoberman, currently receives around 4% of the total tweeting with the crux of the 65% website submissions coming from bots and automated feeds such as Twitterfeed that take an RSS feed and publish it to the micro-blogging site for you.

Via: blog.twitter.com

Full tags

Software, Online, Twitter, Geotagging, TweetDeck, tweetie