Twitter and Foursquare are partnering to improve location in tweets

Twitter and Foursquare are planning to partner together in 2015 to power location in tweets. In fact, the geo-location feature could be introduced as soon the first quarter.

Over the past weeks Twitter has been trying by all means to gather data on its users and it continues its efforts by partnering with Foursquare. The social media network wants to start serving information to users that is relevant and the company believes that with a location layer to its platform it can do this.

This follows an appointment by Twitter of David Blackman, a Geo lead engineer from Foursqaure.

This feature will be an upgrade for Twitter that at the moment can only tell a user’s location when they sign up or when the location that is listed on the bio which does not change based on where the user moves. The feature will allow each tweet’s location to be determined.

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A Twitter spokesperson declined to acknowledge the partnership with Foursquare, but noted the company sees location as a “vehicle of discovery.” Features could include Foursquare-like venue check-ins in tweets, local recommendations, and organizing content around a user’s current whereabouts.

Twitter has previously shown what it can do if it could determine a user’s location. During its Analyst Day on 12 November 2014, the company showed a test it had been running in a few major cities, where it recommended tweets to users that were sent from the location in which users had joined Twitter.

In that presentation Twitter noted that:

“Our goal is to take those learnings and scale them to the rest of the world. There are two key components to nail: 1) Understanding where content is coming from and where the conversation is happening: a country, a city, a neighborhood or venue. 2) Understanding places you care about, whether that’s the place you’re standing when you access Twitter, your home country, or someplace else on the globe that’s captured your attention. Organizing the world’s public conversations in real time can offer limitless opportunities.”

Images: PDF presentation by Twitter