Twitter Places: What Is It Good For?

In the middle of June, Twitter launched “Twitter Places”, a new feature that allows you to tag your tweets with your location.  The rollout hasn’t reached everyone just yet, but the new feature allows you to interact more deeply with users of the service who are near you no matter where you are or if you’re already following one another or not.

Whenever you tweet from the web based service and a number of Twitter clients, you’ll also be prompted with a drop down box for your location.  You can either choose a location or add your own.  By entering your location correctly, Twitter adds your info to a stream around that location.  If you’re using Foursquare or Gowalla, your location will be automatically added to your check in tweets, so it will be easier for your followers on both these location services and Twitter to find you.  You can also make use of the functionality by searching your location to find out what’s happening around you.

Why Haven’t I Heard About It?

Unfortunately, Twitter launched their location service at possibly the worst time.  Ever since the 2010 World Cup began, Twitter has been plagued with downtime due to a nasty combination of increased traffic and system tweaks.  While Twitter is working to accommodate the extra downtime and prevent it from happening again, they’re also making it worse.  The new location system isn’t helping as it creates even more demand on Twitter’s servers.  This means that it hasn’t yet been rolled out internationally even though their scheduled dates for it have come and gone.  They’ve also delayed their demand for the universal switch to OAuth, Twitter’s preferred authentication service, due to the increased downtime.  Using OAuth, third party services simply won’t work if Twitter is down.

Despite Twitter Places’s recent launch, there has been very little buzz about it.  Perhaps that’s down to the lack of API support, since developers can’t use the location data for anything useful yet.  This is promised for the future, but while it’s still withheld, little new can come of the information, and no one seems particularly excited about tagging their tweets with their location.

Now that the World Cup fever has ended and much of the downtime should be over, Twitter Places may receive a bit more attention.

Barriers to Adoption

Quite simply, many people on Twitter just don’t want to share their location with all of their followers and friends.  If you’re interested in being trackable constantly, there are already social networks to help satisfy that need.  So while some may be interested in broadcasting their location along with their tweets, others will simply ignore the feature.  After all, people have used Twitter and Facebook feeds to rob others’ houses, simply by noting the vast number of people who proclaim that they’ve gone away from home; is it the wisest decision to make that information available to the public all the time?  Twitter is even less secure than Facebook.

Conversely, Twitter Places could be very useful in certain situations, like special events.  If you can tag your tweet with a location of a conference, it could replace the need for the hashtag, and therefore free up valuable characters for more informative updates.  Moreover, conferences are excellent places for networking.  It’s likely that their attendees would, at least in this instance, appreciate the ability to find one another and make that rumoured meeting between internet contacts happen.

What seems definite is that Twitter Places won’t really be a success until third parties – or Twitter itself – step in and make the functionality truly useful.  If it does little, few people will be inclined to add in the extra step to their tweets, given that it strips away another layer of privacy from our every day lives.  Without a real purpose, or at least a game like Foursquare offers, Twitter Places will likely remain under the radar for most users of the service.