By Conrad Wadowski

A recent announcement on the Twitter Blog shows an intriguing development in social media: linking tweets to geographical location. Basically, a soon-to-be technology would allow a Twitter user to choose whether or not to display the longitude and latitude coordinates from where the tweet was sent off. This might be positioned like the current display which shows the service used to send out the tweet (e.g. the web, Tweetdeck, photokit, etc.). Adding a new dimension to Twitter has the potential to provide marketing data limited to specific regions, and create a potentially powerful tool for the locally oriented business. It also takes a step towards reduced anonymity between a customer and seller in smaller digital markets, possibly leading to more trust and reduced overall risk. Although the technology isn't available just yet, I wouldn't be surprised if it came out in some form in the not so distant future.