Contentinople - Erin Barker - News Bits: Twitter to Introduce Geo-Location

Written by Erin Barker

Friday, August 21. 2009 at 10:10 AM EDT Post a comment

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Twitter Inc. is working on a new feature that will add a user's location to his Tweets, co-founder Biz Stone announced today in a blog post.

Geo-location was previously offered by some apps, but not many people used it. Now that Twitter is adding native support to the feature with a new API, perhaps this will change.

"It's easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake," Stone wrote on the Twitter blog.

Don't panic about privacy issues -- users will need to opt in to the feature, Stone says, explaining that it "will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time." However, some are theorizing that this feature will later be used to target location-based ads to users.

Twitter is releasing the feature to platform developers first, and then plans to add it to its mobile site and Twitter.com later.

In other news:

This week Flickr removed a controversial image, which casts President Barack Obama as the Joker character from The Dark Knight on the cover of Time magazine, from artist Firas Alkhateeb's page. Though Flickr said they removed the image because it violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, many say Alkhateeb's first-amendment rights were violated, claiming that other similar images, such as those mocking President George W. Bush on a Time magazine cover, have been left up.

After releasing a number of features that mimicked Twitter this year, Facebook is now allowing its users to synch their updates to both sites. Some organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund, and celebrities, like Dane Cook, are already using the features. [Ed. note: And don't you want to be like Dane Cook?]

It is surprising to see Facebook openly acknowledge the power of Twitter -- the new feature's creator, Michael Gummelt, wrote this in the Facebook blog: "Twitter was a natural next step to link with Facebook Pages because it is a powerful tool for broadcasting short messages widely." However, the company's aim may be less generous -- many are theorizing that this is a power play. The new feature is likely an attempt to lure back users from Twitter and become the source of most of the posts on Twitter.

Tags: Business, Copyright, Facebook, Legal, Product Launch, Twitter

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