Twitter for Blackberry Updated, Adds Location Feature

Research in Motion has just announced that its Twitter client for Blackberry is now officially out of beta. Twitter 1.1 will become available for download in Blackberry App World in the next 24 hours.

The application has been tested over the past six months by users of the BlackBerry Beta Zone, RIM's testing lab for software.

One of the most interesting feature that Twitter 1.1 brings to Blackberry devices is called 'Tweet Location' and allows users to pinpoint their location and include it in their tweets.

To enable this feature, one would need to press the Menu key, select Options, choose Add Location To Tweet and then save changes.

As soon as the Tweet Location feature is enabled, users will notice a new compass icon that appears next to the photo icon below the Tweet box.

Simply select this icon to add the location and the BlackBerry smartphone will determine the location and automatically add it to any new Tweets submitted. Disabling this feature is done by selecting the icon again.

Those who wish to find out the location of their friends will need to select the location icon that appears at the bottom right corner of their tweet to open a map view.

Assuming the Add Location feature is enabled, the map will display the location where your friends were at the time they submitted the tweets.

Other new features added with the Twitter 1.1 include Push @Mentions and #Topic Autocomplete.

Push @Mentions allows users to receive notifications on their Blackberry smartphones each time they are mentioned on Twitter.

#Topic Autocomplete displays a list of keywords based on previous words that have been hash-tagged in Tweets, Retweets, or any other words selected or searched for in Popular Topics, as well as in applications like Facebook for BlackBerry smartphones.

The new version of the application also introduces support for additional languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Polish, Czech and Thai.