Twitter adds location to messages

IDG News Service - Twitter has announced the addition of Places on twitter.com and mobile.twitter.com, letting users tag their messages with their location, the company said in a blog post Monday.

Over the next week, Twitter will roll out Places to users in 65 countries, the blog post said. Users should keep an eye out for the "Add your location" link, it said.

To get started using Twitter Places, users first need to enable the "Tweet with Your Location" feature, because Places is turned off by default, according to a Twitter Help Page.

Users can either tag their message with a place from Twitter's database or if, for example, a certain location isn't listed, add a new place to the database, a feature that will be progressively enabled, according to Twitter. When creating a new place, the user is asked to enter the name of the place and its address, according to Twitter. The city should have been selected by default, based on the other data about the user's location, it said.

The Places location gets listed below the message on Twitter's Web site, and doesn't take up any of the 140-character limit. Users can also click on a place within a message and see what others have said from that location.

Places has been integrated with social check-in services Gowalla and Foursquare. The integration will let users click on a Twitter Place, and they will see standard Twitter messages alongside check-ins from Foursquare and Gowalla. Twitter has also developed an API (Application Programming Interface) that lets developers integrate Twitter Places into their applications.

Twitter is working on adding Twitter Places to its other mobile applications, including Twitter for the iPhone, Android-based smartphones and Blackberry. However, its blog post didn't provide details on when they would arrive.

Twitter Places was developed with the help of location companies TomTom and Localeze.