Three months after turning on location-aware tweeting site-wide (and over half a year since that same service launched in its API), Twitter is now rolling out Twitter Places.
Launching simultaneously on both twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, Twitter Places lets users attach locations to their tweets as they have been able to before, but now with more detail. For example, one can now include the information “Whole Food Markets, 399 4th St., San Francisco, CA” instead of merely reporting “San Francisco, CA.”
Twitter geo team member Othman Laraki offers the recent World Cup madness as a good example of when geo-location tagging with Twitter Places might come in handy.
“If you’re like everyone at the Twitter office, you’re going crazy about the World Cup,” writes Laraki. “When turning to Twitter to keep up with the current game, it helps to know where a Tweet is coming from—is that person watching the game on TV or is he actually in the stadium?”
Thanks to partnerships with TomTom and Localeze, Twitter Places is launching in 65 countries over the next week.
As per usual, Twitter is releasing the API for Twitter Places so that third-party developers can integrate Twitter Places into their applications.
Somewhat unexpectedly (though convenient), Twitter has worked closely with two major location-based social networks, Foursquare and Gowalla, to ensure that check-in tweets from those services sync seamlessly with locations shared via Twitter Places. For mobile Twitter users who use neither client, Twitter Places will be rolling out to native Android, BlackBerry, and iPhone applications soon.
Finally, Twitter also announced that its location services now work with Internet Explorer and Safari, in addition to Firefox and Chrome.
