Twitter’s geolocation feature was officially announced today by Twitter co-founder and CEO Biz Stone. Twitter’s location sharing is opt-in, and must be turned on through each individual’s account settings.
To start Tweeting with your location attached, you need to enable the feature in your Twitter Account Settings. Once you’ve opted-in, you will be able to add your location information to all your Tweets or choose to add them to individual Tweets as you compose them. You can choose to share your exact location (your coordinates) or your neighborhood or town.
Currently, the feature only works with Firefox 3.5 and Chrome for Windows. If you decide you want to send a Tweet without your location, you can simply click the “x” next to your location to disable it.
According to TechCrunch the location doesn’t seem to show up in TweetDeck, Seesmic or presumably other third-party clients. And It doesn’t work from Twitter’s mobile site, at least not on the iPhone, where it would make more sense.
There are two options for removing location data:
- Delete the tweet with the data.
- Remove all location data from all of your tweets by clicking the “delete all location data” button on your settings page.
This can take up to 30 minutes, but it will scrub all location information from prior tweets. It is important to note, however, that this does not guarantee the information will be removed from all 3rd-party application’s copies of the data or external search results.
Barracuda Networks claims only 21 percent of the social network’s users fell into the “true user” category. However, the analysis also found that “overall, users are becoming more active on Twitter.”
“True Twitter users” are defined as people that have at least 10 followers, follows at least 10 people, and has tweeted at least 10 times. The study revealed that 17 percent of Twitter users have no followers and the majority – 74 percent – of Twitter users have less than 10 followers.
Social networks will become a fundamental way we communicate with our governments, businesses and loved ones, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams told the BBC. Thus far, Twitter has survived on outside investors and, more recently, deals with Microsoft and Google to list “tweets” into search results.
“The real scalable business model is still in the works,” he added, citing inspiration from Google’s Adwords advertising scheme. Twitter has some 73 million worldwide users.
