Twitter has flipped the switch on its location services and you can now let your followers know exactly where you are when you’re eating that delicious sandwich.
The Places feature will now let you give more context to your tweets by including a location. The company uses a World Cup watcher as an example, as you’ll be able to tell if that person is watching at his house, the stadium or at a local watering hole. It does ask for permission, so don’t worry privacy fans, and the company said it will soon be bringing this feature to its official apps for the BlackBerry, iPhone and Android.
… We’re excited to announce Twitter Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com. Starting today, you can tag Tweets with specific places, including all World Cup stadiums in South Africa, and create new Twitter Places. You can also click a Twitter Place within a Tweet to see recent Tweets from a particular location. Try it out during the next match—you will be able to see Tweets coming from the stadium.
The interesting thing is that the micro-blogging service is playing nice with other check-in providers like Foursquare or Gowalla. Places integrates with these third-party services, so you can see which tweets originated from these apps. The company is also planning to release an application programming interface that will let other developers integrate Places in their apps.
So, it’s good that the micro-blogging service is getting into the location-based services game, as it will probably be able to turn on location-based advertising in the future and actually make some money. It’s not the only social network looking at LBS, as Facebook is also planning to turn on a “check-in service” with big-name partners like McDonald’s. This could really get these services into the mainstream.
[Via Twitter blog]