Twitter announced on the company blog that they’re working on an API which would allow third-party app developers to include location data along with any tweet in the form of longitude and latitude coordinates. The blog itself says that this feature will be off by default, which is a good thing for the tin foil hat wearers among us (or for people who just don’t like it when people know EXACTLY where they are). Based on that, I assume that app makers like TweetDeck will give users an option to show or hide their locations, just because to force users to show where they are is a great way to spark an exodus from your product.
The most interesting speculation I’ve seen so far about the API is from paidContent, which suggests that Twitter might use the data for geotargeted advertising. A lot of people use Twitter the way that we at Techgeist frequently use the Aardvark service. If I were out and about and I tweet “Looking for a good, cheap place to eat,” nearby companies could send me @replies saying “Eat here! Show this tweet and get 20% off” or whatever. In my mind, that’s pretty darn effective. I’m not exactly sure how Twitter would regulate access to this data, but anything that gets the company closer to an actual revenue model is a step in the right direction.
