From http://mashable.com/2009/08/20/twitter-geolocation-features/:
Twitter’s Geolocation API means that tweets are soon to be location-aware. Should you opt-in and share your geolocation with developers, your location in the physical world — ie. your longitude and latitude — will be associated with your tweets.
Geolocation and Twitter can make a beautiful pairing, as we’ve already seen with apps like Twinkle, Twitterfon, Ubertwitter, and Tweetmondo. These apps let you filter your timeline for tweets within a radius of your location, find nearby users, and view tweets on a map.
But there’s still so much room to grow, because, with Twitter’s Geolocation API, each tweet is like a check-in at your location, minus the extra step of checking in. So Twitter and Twitter app developers, you have a big task at hand. We think you’re perfectly poised to build the dream location-aware apps we’ve always wanted, and we’re going to point you toward our wishlist of features that we hope to see come about. This is just scratching surface, so if you’ve got a great location-based tweet idea, share it in the comments.
1. Trending Places
Twitter already has trending topics. We love the utility of knowing what’s hot right now, and we especially love that some Twitter apps are built entirely around slicing and dicing tweets and memes around the trending topics. Now we want all of that goodness, but we want it in relation to places, and we want the power of Twitter search behind it too.
Perhaps we could see trending places worldwide, or filter by country, city, state, or town, but either way we think there’s immediate value in seeing where we congregate. We think this could work by measuring the fluctuation in tweets per area, and we think it could be pretty cool.
2. Customizable DMs for Places
Tweetmondo has a “keep me updated” feature that DMs you whenever someone new is at a location of your interest. We like the idea, but we think it can be massively improved and rolled out to a global audience.
Here’s our thinking. You tell Twitter, or a Twitter app, a location of interest — we’re thinking a favorite coffee spot or bar — that location is saved, and you get a DM when someone tweets from the same spot (regardless of whether or not you’re following each other). It’s the location-based social connector with Twitter as the medium. In this model, you would be able to set the hours for when DMs are acceptable, save your places, and turn place DMs on or off (maybe with an SMS command).
Sounds nifty, right? Then think about all the great data one could harness from saved locations. This is powerful stuff we’re playing with.
3. Audio Notifications for Nearby Friends
Tweetmondo has a “keep me updated” feature that DMs you whenever someone new is at a location of your interest. We think that’s interesting, but we’d like the idea applied to friends and we’d like to see it in our desktop apps.
Here’s what we want. TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop, and other desktop applications should build in audio notifications for nearby friends. We want the apps to let us set our preferences by friend or by predefined column/group. This way we can have full control (and spying power) over these specialized notifications, giving us an even better system for tapping into a trusted network of friends and their physical location.
4. Push or SMS Notifications for Friends
This ties into to our previous wish, but with mobile devices in particular in mind. We want the same abilities to set preferences for audio notifications, but we want them in a mobile equivalent. We’d like to opt-in to push notifications, and maybe the occasional SMS update, from just specific friends or groups of friends.
5. Tweets as Check-ins
Plenty of us already enjoy the location-based social experience. Foursquare is certainly taking hyperlocal metros by storm, and Brightkite, Whirl, Loopt, and Latitude each have their own following, and each of them are positioned to win with location-aware tweets.
Think about it. Right now the physical act of checking in can be quite tedious, and we’d love to see the option to use our regular tweets as check-ins. This is likely more complicated than it sounds, but if we hand over the right permissions and customized settings, we could see it working out where your location-aware tweet prompts an approved service of choice to ask if we want to check-in there. The asking could happen via SMS, push notification, DM, email, IM, or any other distribution method of our choosing.
Reviews: Brightkite, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Twinkle, Twitter, Twitterfon
Tags: geolocation, Lists, location, twitter
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