The location features aren't coming to Twitter.com for now

Nov 20, 2009 12:20 GMT  ·  By

Location services are becoming increasingly popular and, with the right devices and tools to take advantage of, they're also becoming more useful. Twitter has been working on location features for a couple of months now and the microblogging service has finally enabled them, but for now, only for third-party developers, meaning there are no changes to Twitter.com.

“In August we announced that we were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Today, the Geotagging API is officially available,” Twitter Platform Director Ryan Sarver wrote.

“This release is unique in that it's API-only which means you won't see any changes on twitter.com, yet. Instead, Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality (go try them out now!) in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted,” he added.

With geolocation, Twitter can attach location information to any tweet, information which could be used in any number of ways, like searching for tweets which are nearby or focusing on the information coming from an event location. The limit is really what the developers can come up with and already a number of services are making use of the geolocation Twitter API to enhance their products.

As Twitter insists on noting, the feature is only available for developers wanting to implement it in their apps for now. This isn't much of a surprise as Twitter announced from the get-go that this is the path it will take with the new feature. And there's a good reason for it, Twitter needs to make really sure that all of the kinks are ironed out before it launches on the site as the feature raises some big privacy issues. Still, Twitter insists that there's nothing to worry about and has taken several steps to ensure that people are well aware of the feature and they have full control over it. Using the geolocation feature is completely optional and users have to specifically enable the functionality. After this, location data can be added on a tweet by tweet basis, but this is up to the third-party developers to chose how they will handle it.