Twitterplace Twitter Places was just unveiled and is designed to provide more context for tweets.

The location option has been available since April, but now you can see who else tweeted recently from the same location. It also shows nearby locations, and points of interest — everything from restaurants and retail to churches and more.

In fact, by integrating with Gowalla and Foursquare, users can also see who’s checked into these locations using those services. Twitter is also offering access to its API to encourage third party apps to add this functionality.

Anyone that’s used a third party app knows these interfaces already work pretty hard at offering a clean view of more information than you can view using Twitter. It will be interesting to see how Tweetdeck, Hootsuite and mobile apps like Twitteriffic serve this up.

More Context or More Noise?
The new functionality makes sense in that it taps into our geo-location fascination. But it will surely raise the privacy discussion. While Twitter Place will not serve up protected tweets, there can be implications to offering your location. And from a practical standpoint some users may wonder if Twitter Places is not just more noise in the stream.

I’m in a wait and see mode. It’s only been a few hours, right?! In general I’m all for convergence — where it makes sense. But in far more extreme examples we’ve seen situations where just because we can does not mean we should. I’m thinking of the initial Google Buzz roll out and the Facebook F8 integration.

To be clear, comparing those situations to this new functionality is like comparing apples to oranges at best. I’m just looking forward to seeing how users embrace places.

Related
Fast Company: Twitter Finally Going Places
Mashable: Twitter Launches “Places”

Cross-posted to my work blog: Social Study

Resources
Post Your Resume to 65+ Job Sites
Resume Service

Post to Twitter Tweet This Post


Popular Tags:
 options   mobile applications   Twitter   customers   Foursquare   integration