Today, Twitter announced a native geo-location API. The API will be in the form of opt-in data fields, allowing an application (and the user) to set the geo-location information on a tweet-by-tweet basis. For example, a user might set a mobile device to include the location (derived from the device's built-in GPS receiver) for tweets about specific events or locations - eg. tweets related to a natural disaster, public event, or even a "meet me outside the art gallery". Privacy is ensured as the service is opt-in, and requires the application to explicitly attach the location data fields.

There have been a number of third party attempts to include geo-location information in tweets. These have been flawed for a variety of reasons. Coordinates could be difficult to enter/interpret with few if any automated standards. Coordinates could also take up valuable tweet characters. Encoding schemes helped to reduce character counts, but these also made the coordinates even less intelligible. The end result is that very few tweets currently include geo-location data. This is likely to change as the new data fields are adopted by Twitter applications, and new Twitter map-view applications are created.

Twitter's blog announcement post can be read here.

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