People will soon know the location you are tweeting from as Foursquare, a local search and discovery service mobile application will soon be collaborating with Twitter to make tweets more pertinent to the location it is being posted from. Currently it is possible for oneself to tag the location in a tweet but there is limitation of revealing the town or city that one is in.
Now with these two forces joining together, people will be able to tag individual locations like the restaurant that you at having a meal at with your iPhone or Android device. This is a feature which is fully utilizing the gigantic cache of data that Foursquare has been building ever since its operation and something which is providing users with another way to search for data and more importantly, for Twitter to monetize the data.
The co-founder and CEO of Foursquare Dennis Crowley has noted in a post that the target has always been to “to create a system that could crawl the world with people in the same way Google crawls web pages with machines.”
The whole idea for building the network of Foursquare has been to “build a company that would bring our vision of context-aware services-software that can learn about the places you’ve been and can proactively recommend places you’d love to hundreds of millions of people,” Crowley stated.
He also said that “We can be a successful company with the fraction of the users that Twitter and Facebook [have].”
Ben Horowitz, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and Foursquare board member has stated that “The Foursquare platform is a pretty fast-growing SaaS business compared to the other new SaaS businesses we’re invested in. To build [Foursquare’s data business] from nothing would be exceptionally difficult.”
So far, it has been reported that Foursquare has collected 7 billion check-ins at 65 million places all around the world.
In future, the biggest revenue source of Foursquare will be flowing in from the 85,000 developers who have been creating tools and services using the Foursquare data.
Twitter has not yet declared when this feature will be up and running but it has mentioned in the support documentation that:
You can choose to add a location to your Tweets using Twitter for Android, Twitter for iOS, twitter.com or other mobile applications. For example: To give additional location context to your Tweet, you can add a general location label such as “SoMa, San Francisco.” In select locations, you may also label your Tweet with the name of a specific business, landmark, or other point of interest. These locations are provided by Foursquare.
Twitter has announced this upcoming new feature in a tweet of course, along with a video showing how the feature works.
