Twitter Is not A Geolocation Power House
I think this is exactly why Twitter founders do not talk too much about their development strategies: As soon as an idea slips out of their mouth, it becomes the next Twitter we should all expect in the coming days.
This week end, Techcrunch reported on an interview Evan Williams had with Der Spiegel, where he mentions that Twitter could possibly delivers local breaking news to users based on their locations. Everybody is getting excited about it, as you can read in the comments of the Techcrunch article, but there is something that doesn’t fit in this story: Twitter doesn’t know where I am.
It is true, Twitter is not a geolocation company. It doesn’t track people based on their location and deliver services based on those locations. Yes, for ‘tweeps’ using smartphones, a latitude/longitude will be attached to all tweets transmitted to the phone. Other desktop apps will also attach your location to the tweets you send. On users’ profiles, you will see a location, but users would need to constantly update their feeds to make this location accurate in the here and now. I see this geolocation feature mainly as a way for tweeps to easily spot other tweeps.
Twitter has a problem: it is too noisy. I only use Twitter as a search engine, and for succinct communications with unknown others. Anyone who tracks their Thwirl, Tweetdeck and other app all day long to follow discussions is losing an incredible amount of time and productivity. Too many people use it has a way to grow an audience, following thousands of other tweeps, expecting follow-backs, with no intent to actually connect with the people they follow.
Anyhow, my point is that there is too much noise on Twitter. So if you couple this fact with the fact that Twitter would do a bad job delivering geo-targeted local news, you see how your stream would get even more polluted. Twitter is in no position to do this.
One interesting fact is that Twitter was early-funded by Union Square Ventures, the same VCs that early-funded Outside.in, the site that tracks the Web for news in your area. Now maybe it would be a good idea if Outside.in users could subscribe to the local news through their Twitter stream. But that’s a different story.
Finally, to spot geolocated Twitter feeds, there is Twinkle. It works great, and fits the need of the niche that is interested in getting geolocated news in their feeds.
Another way to see it is that users could turn on an alert whenever they want to get geolocated tweets in their streams. In that case, Twitter would need to have a GPS-enabled technology to track users on the go (a tracking system that doesn’t require sending tweets to be found). If Latitude is planning on opening up an API, I guess this is something doable…
Tags: geolocation, news, twitter
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