Twitter gets even better with the introduction of a new opt-in geolocation feature that will allow you to identify where you are tweeting from. Attaching your location to a tweet is nothing new to smartphone owners, but having the location-aware feature baked into Twitter opens the floodgates to hosts of cool new Twitter tricks.
Twitters geolocation feature works by embedding geographic metadata to tweets. Developers get to play around with this feature first, and presumably geolocation will follow for average Twitter users.
I have some reservations to the services I've outlined here. But I like to keep an open mind and in doing so offer some potential cool uses of Twitter's geolocation feature.
Social Recommendations from Real People
An increasing amount of people use Twitter to check out hip places to go out in their area. Whether it's a restaurant or a nightclub, location aggregators for mini-reviews could prove as an insightful resource.
Say I'm in town and I'm looking for a quiet cafe. I would just send out a tweet broadcasting my location and then I could access a plethora of other people's recommendations or experiences from similar places in the area. Another cool implementations would be for business to send over discount codes when I tweet near them.
Relevant Localized News
Sure, I could check a hyper-local news website from my neighborhood, but if I'm somewhere else, I'd like to know where all the hipness happens. I will be able to switch from reading the tweets of the people I follow to reading messages from people in my area.
Even better, an alert service could let me know when a sudden spike in tweets from my area emerges - maybe it's a good gig in a bar and loads of people are liking it or, something much worse, such as an earthquake alert.
Find Friends and Cool People Around You
Twitter's geolocation would also mean a whole new arena for socializing. You could track whether your friends are somewhere near you and establish an impromptu meeting. There's an increasing number of people using Twitter to arrange meeting at a local level, and geolocation should also aid their purpose.
And why not geolocated dating? Some might find it practical to use Twitter geolocation to find true love, or less. I can see this happening, as more and more people are joining the service (44+ million users at the moment).
Note: before you start having doubts about my memory capabilities, I must let you know that there are just as many downsides to Twitter's geolocation feature as upsides. For those who value their privacy, you might want to check my 3 reasons why Twitter's geolocation feature won't do.
P.S.: Yes, I'm on Twitter. Follow me @danielionescu
