Monday, November 09, 2009

Link by Link - Refining the Twitter Explosion With GPS - NYTimes.com

Twitter and the quest to overcome TMI (too much information)

Improvements like geolocation have the potential to make the Internet suddenly relevant to society as it is lived, not just relevant to what happens online. Mr. Sarver imagines features like “local trending topics,” a list of subjects popular in a particular area; or searches for happy hour in a neighborhood of Dallas that will intelligently link tweets about happy hours to the place they were sent from.

Because GPS will provide the ability to become very “granular” with locations, you could mimic through Twitter the banter at the local diner or a barbershop, by limiting a search of tweets to a two-block radius.

There is also the fear of loss of privacy and loss of security as once-local chats become globally public. That is why Mr. Sarver said Twitter would require two “opt in” decisions — at the profile level and again through the application.

Link by Link - Refining the Twitter Explosion With GPS - NYTimes.com

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