What’s Happening—and Where?

By
Friday, 12 March 2010

Every day, millions of tweets are created. These little bursts of information are about anything and everything—they make Twitter a hub for discovering what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world. A recent burst of interest in location sharing applications, games, and services has many Twitter users excited about appending geographic data to some of their tweets.

Not everyone wants to add their current location to a tweet so this feature is off by default and must be activated to use. Check out How To Tweet with Your Location to learn how you can turn it on. People who choose to add this additional layer of context help make Twitter a richer information network for all of us—location data can make tweets more useful.

Let’s say I’m at my office and I hear a loud boom. It sounded serious, so I search Twitter for “boom.” Among the first results could be someone who tweeted “Boom go the fireworks!” This could be anywhere in the world. However, if that person had activated the new tweet location feature then the neighborhood data under the tweet would read, “SoMa.”

Now I know it’s just fireworks going off in my neighborhood. Boom! Plus, the word “SoMa” is linked to a Google map so I can explore a bit more. There are many ways location data can be useful when paired with tweets. For more information on how this feature works, be sure to check out our help article, About the Tweet With Your Location Feature.

Update: Forgot to share that this feature is initially available only to US users with more countries on the way and wanted to mention the fine folks at Maponics, our partner in providing neighborhood information.