Location-aware services are starting to gather steam. Thanks to a number of things coming together, GPS-enabled mobile devices, web browsers with geolocation and an increasingly mobile Internet population, everything is set for this type of services to take off. But few of the existing ones have the size or the popularity that Twitter enjoys at the moment. And now that the microblogging site has announced it will begin adding location information to tweets it is set to become a very powerful player in the field.

“We're gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won't be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information,” cofounder and resident public voice Biz Stone wrote on the Twitter blog.

The new feature is in the early stages for now and there is no set launch date but it should be coming sooner rather than later. The new functionality will be rolled out as a “developer preview” at first, meaning that only third-party developers will be able to integrate the location information in their apps using the API Twitter will provide. After this phase the regular and the mobile versions of the site will feature location information for tweets as well.

The feature will be opt-in, of course, and is disabled by default with concerns of user privacy. Users who do want to add the geolocation metadata to their tweets will be able to do so, opening up the platform to a great number of possibilities. Stone sees the Twitter search one day having a location filter that would allow users to search for tweets near their homes or at a specified location, like an event or an interesting landmark. Twitter could even introduce the possibility for users to automatically get the tweets that are coming from their neighborhood in their streams. In any case, the future looks like it's going to be very “location-aware.”