Twitter Lets Tweeters Add Location by Name

By Geoff Duncan June 15, 2010

Image used with permission by copyright holder

Everybody knows you can’t pack a lot of information into 140-character messages, and while social messaging service Twitter rolled out location-aware services earlier this year that lets users tap into Geolocation services to specify a location, sometimes a street address just isn’t very useful. Would you rather people saw your tweet was from “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” or “The White House?”

To that end, Twitter has just rolled out Twitter Places, a new feature that enables users to tag their tweets with the location of specific places by name, instead of by address. Twitter has set up databases of known places in 65 countries (thanks data partnerships with TomTom and Localeze) that people can use by name to show the location of their tweets…and users can add additional locations. The service is available on the twitter.com site as well as mobile.twitter.com.

Twitter has partnered with Foursquare and Gowalla to poll location information from users’ check-ins with those services. Clicking on a Twitter Place will show both tweets associated with that named location, but also check-ins from Gowalla and FourSquare. Twitter is also publishing the API functionality so Twitter client developers can bring Twitter Places right into their dedicated client apps (expect Twitter to do the same for its own iPhone and BlackBerry apps). Twitter has also added location support for more desktop Web browsers.

As always, users of location-based services should be aware of privacy implications and the potential for mis-use of the data. A tweet that says you’re out of the country on a vacation may tell the wrong person your house is unoccupied and ripe for the picking; similarly, a tweet from a local sports event during work hours might make an employer a little unhappy.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Twitter

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Geoff Duncan writes, programs, edits, plays music, and delights in making software misbehave. He's probably the only member…

Social Media

Twitter begins rollout of new gray check marks only to abruptly remove them

Elon Musk.

In the middle of writing an article about Twitter's initial rollout of a new gray check mark verification badge, we noticed something odd: Twitter accounts that had the new gray check marks only minutes earlier were suddenly without them again. So what happened?

Elon Musk apparently happened. Mere hours after his newly purchased social media platform began its rollout of a new gray check mark in an effort to help clarify which high-profile accounts were actually verified, the new gray check marks began disappearing from various accounts, evidently at Musk's behest. Just take a look at this tweet conversation between web video producer Marques Brownlee and Musk:

Social Media

Some blue check Twitter users were unable to edit their names

Twitter app on the OnePlus 10T.

Twitter's recent blue check verification drama took an even sillier turn yesterday. Amid all the recent commotion regarding Twitter Blue subscriptions, paying for blue checks, and impersonation versus parody, some Twitter users temporarily lost their ability to edit their screen names.

On Monday evening, some verified Twitter users began reporting that they couldn't change their screen names. It's unclear to us at this time if the issue these users were experiencing was a bug or a new feature of a platform that was recently purchased by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Social Media

Mastodon surpasses 1 million monthly active users as Twitter backlash worsens

Series of four mobile screenshots showing Mastodon's sign-up process.

Mastodon, an alternative to Twitter that's been getting a lot of attention lately, just surpassed 1 million monthly active users this week, all while Twitter struggles to deal with the backlash caused by recently announced changes to its platform.

On Monday, Eugen Rochko, founder and CEO of Mastodon, announced via a Mastodon post that the social media platform now has "1,028,362 monthly active users across the network today." This news comes after a particularly tumultuous week (and weekend) for Twitter after Elon Musk took over the popular microblogging platform just last month.