Filed under: Features, Web services, Microblogging
Big news from Twitter this week: the launch of Places, the next step in Twitter's plan for location-based features. You could already set a general location for your tweets, but now you can tag them with specific places. Places integrates with location-based apps Foursquare and Gowalla.
These apps can already spam Twitter (ugh), but Places actually fixes that problem. Instead of checking in from Foursquare or Gowalla, you can just tag a tweet, and check in automatically. That means your followers see a regular tweet, and you get the checkin (and the points, or mayorship, or whatever) anyway. It's a big win all around.
Of course, this is also good for Twitter in its evolution as an advertising platform (double-ugh). Twitter can offer advertisers much more in-depth data when its huge database of tweets becomes very specifically geotagged. Will Twitter ultimately try to replace Foursquare and Gowalla, the way it's trying to replace third-party Twitter clients and ad networks, or are these services too far ahead now for Twitter to ever catch up? Somehow I doubt even Twitter could buy Foursquare out from under Dens Crowley at this point. The dude is riding high on Foursquare's wave of success, and I don't blame him for wanting to see it through to its full potential before cashing in.
Speaking of Twitter's potential revenue streams, Trending Topics might be up for sale as ad space pretty soon. All Things D reports that Twitter has been courting new advertisers with the opportunity to buy a trend on the extremely high-visibility "trending topics" list. Of course, users who clicked on that trend would see your Promoted Tweets at the top of the search results. If I didn't ignore trending topics altogether, I'd be worried that this is sending Twitter further down the path of corporate spam.
Also, it's logistically complex. How many companies could buy a trending topic at once, and what percentage of users would see each one? Is there any fair way to do this, other than selling the space to the highest bidder? Twitter will have to address these questions and more in the coming months.
You've likely noticed that Twitter has been plagued with outages and malware attacks of late. Fail whales were a common sight this week, and it may or may not have had anything to do with the massive popularity of the World Cup on Twitter. Have you seen Twitter's sort-of-goofy World Cup page? You can also add a country's flag to a tweet by hashtagging it. For example, #ITA would give you an Italian flag.
About those malware attacks, though: beware of mysterious @replies from random strangers. Apparently, spammers are just shooting links to viruses willy-nilly across Twitter. Don't click through, just block and report. Hopefully, Twitter will find a way to clear up the malware problem the same way they cracked down on porn-bots in the early days.
That's all for this week's Twitter Tuesday, but you can bet I'll be tracking Twitter news all week, and you can read it all in the next edition!
Twitter Tuesday - Twitter launches Places, integrates with Foursquare and Gowalla originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink�|�Email this�|�CommentsJennifer O'Dell
Ananda Lewis
Esther Ca�adas
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