Twitter turns location on for its website, but not for search

Twitter now lets people see maps of where geotagged tweets were sent from on its website. (They briefly showed this feature yesterday, but it quickly disappeared. It’s now turned on permanently.)
The company launched a location application programming interface last November that let users attach their location to tweets, and startups like Seemic and Tweetdeck were quick to build features around the new data. But it’s taken more than three months for Twitter itself show geotagged tweets on its web site.
Today, if you see a tiny location marker next to the attribution on a tweet, you can hover over it and a map will pop up showing where the tweet was published from. It’s a nice addition based off the Google Maps application programming interface that helps the website catch up to the experience other companies are providing off Twitter’s data.
But it’s far from what’s needed to make Twitter a real player in location. This new maps feature isn’t turned on for Twitter’s search results and the company’s search engine hasn’t changed all that much either. For example, you can look for tweets from downtown San Francisco. But you’ll get a mix of results — you’ll get tweets that were actually sent from downtown San Francisco within the last hour and tweets from people who claim on their profiles that they’re in downtown San Francisco (even if they’re really on a business trip in New York). In contrast, if you use the ‘Nearby’ feature on Google Buzz’s mobile web site, you’ll get content that’s actually been sent from around you because it’s verified by GPS.
Tags: geolocation, geotagged, location, tweets
Companies: Twitter