At Twitter’s Chirp conference today, @ev announced a new feature coming to Twitter: the ability to attach tweets to actual places. “You’ll be able to click, for example, the Palace of Fine Arts, to see what everyone there is saying,” he said. “We’re really excited about this because location is fundamental to relevance.”
Twitter already allows geolocation by city, neighborhood or lat/long, but attaching tweets to recognizable place names will help provide a new level of location relevance that has become popular via services like Foursquare and Gowalla. “We’re not looking to duplicate (them),” @ev said. “We want to make those services work better with Twitter. What we really care about is the content about that place.” So you wouldn’t be “checking in” per se, but assigning your tweet to a place.
Of all Twitter’s location efforts to date, this addition, to me, seems the most promising in helping filtering conversations. You’re more likely to attach your tweet to a location, say, a park, if you’re actually writing about the park — instead of just offering some random observation about the cheeseburger you just ate. Well, at least in theory.
Twitter plans to offer more details about the API that will connect into the new feature later today at the Chirp conference, which you can watch live here.
