Twitter innovates with geolocation in tweets

BANGALORE, INDIA: Keep aside the rumours of Twitter not getting the trademark for 'tweet'. Also forget the apprehensions about the financial prospects of the microblogging sensation. This is because, despite the struggle, Twitter is coming up with new ideas, the latest being a new feature in its API: the capability to optionally put geolocation data into tweets.

The announcement was made by Twitter founder Biz Stone in his recent blog post. “For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city - whether you follow them or not. It's easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake,” his post read.

But Twitter is developing an API specifically for third-party platforms like Tweetdeck and Tweetie first, so that the applications will be able to link a user’s latitude and longitude to their tweets. “We're going to release geolocation to platform developers before we add the feature to Twitter.com,” said the blog.

The innovative idea seems to have an economic dimension as well, though Biz Stone has not mentioned anything about it. By adding geolocation data into tweets, the site can also exploit that potential of geotargeted ads. A potentially business move at last?