Its location based services everywhere

Looks like this year is going to be hot for Location based services and apps. Earlier it used to be small startups working on Location based mobile apps. That’s no more the case. Lot of big companies are trying to solve the Location mystery with each coming up with their own niche. Twitter just announced their location based service called Places . Facebook has plans to launch its own location based service. What’s interesting about this service is that it complements some of the existing services like Foursquare, Gowalla etc. Twitter is getting into Location big time.They already have a partnership agreement with TomTom and Localeze. In addition, they acquired MixerLabs, Creator of GeoApi startup last year.


The new feature helps discover more places (Point of Interest) and tweets based on User location. Users will be able to select places from a list in their areas based on the tweet posted from twitter home page or mobile site. Soon the service will be extended to Mobile clients. The tweets are not only limited to twitter, users can also see Check-Ins from Foursquare and Gowalla. With the vast user base that twitter has, what I would love to see is an open database of Point Of Interest that is powered by both users and existing data.

Several other features of this launch include:

• Foursquare and Gowalla integration: Many Foursquare and Gowalla users publish check-ins to Twitter. Location is a key component of these Tweets, so we worked closely with both companies to associate a Twitter Place with Tweets generated by these services. This means that if you click on a Twitter Place, such as "Ritual Roasters," you will see standard Tweets and check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla.
• API: We are releasing API functionality that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications.
• Support for more browsers: Now, you can add location to your Tweets from any browser—Safari and Internet Explorer, in addition to Chrome or Firefox.

Twitter plans to roll out this feature to users in 65 countries around the world. So have fun exploring new interesting places and tweets.