These days, we’re inundated with information. It comes at us from all directions, all the time — we’d be in serious trouble if we didn’t have a couple of years to ease into it all. We try to handle and organize the information we come across in order to make it easier to digest.
As useful as the Twitter service is, it can be tough — even intimidating — for some users to stick with it before becoming overwhelmed and frustrated by the flow of information. Developers have helped to ease the pain by releasing apps that take advantage of great features to make interacting within the social network much easier, even before Twitter implements similar features.
Twitter doesn’t ignore us as it may seem sometimes, because today the company confirmed the release of a useful new feature: Local Trending.
Basically, Local Trending is a take on Twitter’s Trending Topics feature, but catered to your area. You can see more of the specifics about the feature here, in an earlier post.
It sounds great and I’m looking forward to when it’s fully released into the wild, but…
Why does it matter?
In order to really get into that, we’ll have to look to how location based services, or LBS, came to be in the first place. The first geographical information system was developed as part of a project in 1962 when Canada decided to get a Land Inventory together (thanks, Canada!). This was basically the first version of the database that’s behind things like Google maps, and keeps GPS’s from getting you lost. I won’t bore you with the rest of the detailed stuff, so I’ll just draw a sweet venn diagram for you.
So to get the LBS’s we have today, you need some neat things: the Internet, some kind mobile device, and a location information database. Smash them together and you have fun applications like Foursquare and features like Twitter’s geolocation tags. Think about all of the mobile data applications that are linked to location info, and ease of accessibility to devices like the iPhone that have the technology built in.
What’s the big picture?
Where we are, our location, plays a key role in determining what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Location is correlated with our choices — of our needs, as consumers, for information and products. So when businesses work with an LBS, it becomes win-win for both parties. Businesses get money from, well, business, and pushing related ads, just to name a couple. What do we get as consumers? Stuff we want — things that are relevant to us — and more power to filter out what we don’t.
Focusing on Twitter
It’s all about what’s relevant to you. What information is valuable. When faced with information saturation, we seek value. Twitter has given us another way to turn down the noise, and really get to the nitty gritty of what matters to us, where we live. Although there is hesitation by most to open up and provide the data needed to drive the local trending topics — geotagging — communication has shifted, and it’s time to embrace the advantages of word of mouth networking. That is, if you haven’t already.
According to our earlier post, “currently, Twitter’s geolocation feature has not seen a great deal of uptake with only 0.23% of tweets with geolocation enabled.”
If geolocation is how Twitter will power new features, then we need to get on the ball to make it work.
For the everyday user, local trends will help to filter out noise, and you never know — you might discover a new restaurant or even connect with your community in a whole new way. Local businesses will be able to pinpoint activities, up the ante on customer service and act from there.
Overall, for diehard twitterers, the new Local Trending feature is a dream — both to businesses and consumers. If you’re a bit cautious to jump into the service, this feature just may help you get used to the water and stick around long enough to enjoy it.
As a geographer I wholly agree on the part of 'location matters', but I must disagree on the need for actual geotagging of tweets. The simple argument on my part is that it gives an unnecessarily high resolution compared to what is actually appreciated by the user.
To put it in extreme: If you happily tweet about your new favourite café from the comfort of say, your bathroom at home, then geotagging isn't the method for you. Geotagging has value if used at the actual site of happening, everything else is redundant or possibly dangerous to yourself.
Geotagging has good uses I agree, but instead of making it some ubiquitous feature, it should be easily turned on and off per tweet. Don't look at geotagging as the feature for everybody. Let those that need to verify their location do so per tweet and let the others tweet merrily without.
Twirus.com maintains Trending Topics for several languages (German,Spanish, French,Portuguese,Italian,Dutch) and countries (Australia, UK, Canada) and we can confirm that using the right Tweets for your trends is hard. We are just setting up Chile, but you cannot just use the Twitter API to fetch the right tweets. You get tweets from all over the world, for example South-Africa.
So Twirus.com specializes in the non-English languages, and we really wonder how Twitter, that is not really known to adapt quickly to other languages, is going to remove the crap from the Trending Topics.
Probably their Trending Topics for English speaking countries and cities are going to be quit good.
According to our earlier post, “currently, Twitter’s geolocation feature has not seen a great deal of uptake with only 0.23% of tweets with geolocation enabled.”
- Geotagging defaulted off
- No web ui support in Twitter
- No tools (like tweetdeck) for geo-tagging posts
- Systems that do support geo-tagging mostly assume an iPhone. Hello? A laptop is portable. An internet cafe is a location.
And we're surprised nobody is using it?
Personally I feel like twitter's problem with geotagging use is similar to twitters issue overall. Twitter is this extremely useful tool that doesn't really know how to market itself. The funny thing is that I don't think twitter really cares, its been extremely successful with creating tools and letting the community shape how they are used.
However, I do think that this is going to answer the question of “How does twitter monetize?”
Anyone thats curious about how location feeds into building a user's context, “Location: It's All About Context.” Check it out! http://www.mobilebehavior.com/2010/01/20/locati…
Kristin, nice piece on the value of location. I am in the real estate business and have 30+ community blog sites that have proven to be a valuable resource for my company and the community. However, we don't post community information from our blog on Twitter specifically because of the location issue. That is changing and it will help community blogging strategies immensely. Thanks for sharing.
Best wishes.
Local Trending is a part of almost all the social networking sites. I agree with it.
To put it in extreme: If you happily tweet about your new favourite café from the comfort of say, your bathroom at home, then geotagging isn't the method for you. Geotagging has value if used at the actual site of happening, everything else is redundant or possibly dangerous to yourself.
I can't believe that anyone would agree that being inundated with even more advertisements is a “win” for them. Local Trending is just another ploy to induce subscribers to turn on their geo-tagging, so their locations can be mined for sale to advertisers. Frankly, I'm surprised that even 0.23% are gullible enough to voluntarily give up their autonomy and compromise their security just so Twitter can reap greater advertising dollars (read: http://www.philiphall.com/?p=150). What if Twitter told us we all should post our credit card numbers continually so advertisers wouldn't have to bother us about buying something, they could just use our cards and save us the hassle. I wonder of 0.23% would engage in that as well…