Twitter is about to make life a whole lot easier to navigate, with the introduction of what it is calling Geolocation, which will help finding meaningful information when searching (ever harder even with hashtags) a whole lot easier as the number of tweets inexorable rises.Geolocation according to a piece in the New York Times is going to allow "Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet" by taking advantage of global positioning systems on mobile phones.This year, the year of the Twitter explosion if you want, the number of tweets each day has risen from 2.4m in January to 26m by October, according to a researcher at the University of Iowa, Alessio Signorini. The number of tweets has risen as its user base has continued broaden as last week's news showed.Although reading some blog posts like this one by Graham Jones (he's an internet psychologist) you'd think Twitter was over. Jones is concerned that Twitter is dying following the departure from these microblogging shores of Miley Cyrus ("So, should you ignore Twitter too and take a lead from Miley Cyrus?") and Stephen Fry's cry for some digital attention. Oh and that PR puff about time wasting on Twitter costing UK business £1.4bn (without considering the positive impact it had).I digress and while I'd like to take a lead from Miley Cyrus people would think it was weird. So anyway, geolocation and hashtags THEY should in theory make it easy to track down the tweets you are interested in reading and tracking, but increasingly as big national and global events take place (with ever more tweets) much news is retweeted again and again and some of it (say it quietly) is not that useful. What you want is the good stuff. If people are on the scene producing eye witness user generated content then that is what you want access to.The New York Times cites the tragic shooting at the Fort Hood US Army base in Texas where 13 were left dead by a Muslim gunman. Thousands if not tens of thousands were retweeting the news, but if you really wanted to know what was happening on the ground simply looking for the phrase "Fort Hood" or the hashtag #fthood wasn't going to cut it.While it was possible to find tweets of soldiers near the base, using the existing location filter, geolocation will make Twitter much easier to navigate and allow people to specify very precisely in what they want to see on their screen. Geolocation promises a lot of other possibilities particularly in the creation of tools and services based around very local communities. Sarver at Twitter suggests that it could lead to new features like "local trending topics" as Twitter is broken down by GPS allowing using and developers to better segment what they are seeing.Twitter says geolocation should be released within the next few weeks and comes swiftly on the heels of Twitter lists and its move to formally incorporat in to the site's design the ability to retweet and for users to track how many times a tweet is repeated by others (a nice little metric for people like us). What else would be useful?
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Gordon Macmillan
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