Twitter Quietly Enables Geolocation

Twitter has been touting the upcoming geolocation feature for a while now. Announced more than a month ago, the feature was set to become live, for developers at least, sometime last week but some issues pushed it back several days. It now appears to be live, despite Twitter not making any actual announcement, with the feature showing up in a Twitter iPhone app.

TechCrunch first noticed that location markers started showing up in Tweetie 2, an upcoming Twitter client app for the iPhone which hasn't been released to the public yet. The app had incorporated the new geolocation capabilities Twitter has been working on, but the code was there in the eventuality of the feature going live with no real way of testing it. The fact that all tweets now had a location associated with them meant that geolocation was working at Twitter. The microblogging site has since confirmed the fact that the functionality is now available for third-party developers using the Twitter API.

There was a small problem though; most tweets seem to have originated from the middle of the ocean off the south coast of Ghana in the Atlantic. In fact, the location was precisely 0 degrees latitude and 0 degrees longitude so there was obviously some kind of glitch. It turns out that the API documentation was spotty on how to handle tweets that didn't have location data so it seems that they just default to 0, 0.

The geolocation feature was first announced in August and it allows tweets to have their own location data, something that has a lot of possible applications. Third-party developers would be the first to be able to use geolocation but it will eventually make its way to Twitter.com as well. Twitter has been very concerned with the privacy implications and a lot of consideration has been given to these issues with the users having full control over what they send out. It was supposed to launch last week but it wasn't quite ready and it appears to be live now. Twitter will probably make some kind of announcement at some point.