Twitter Inc Teams With Foursquare

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Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) may be planning to add more location features to make its product more useful for users. The micro-blogging platform is believed to have partnered with Foursquare. The two are planning to come together to add locations to tweets in 2015, says a report from Business Insider, which cites a source familiar with the deal.

Twitter builds location department

In the first quarter of 2015, we might get to see the new geo-based features being rolled out by the company, says BI. Twitter is said to be staffing a new location department. The company has already hired David Blackman, a geo lead from Foursquare, and has listed on its website job openings for six other geo-engineers.

Twitter presently has a limited number of location features that identify the user’s location whenever he or she signs up, and the location listed by the users in their bio. However, now the company wants to determine the location from where tweets are originating.

Location is being seen as a “vehicle of discovery” by the company, according to by a spokesperson at Twitter, who did not acknowledge the partnership with Foursquare, says BI. Some of the geo features the micro-blogging company is planning to roll out are local recommendations, venue check-ins in tweets, and organization of content around the current whereabouts of users, according to the spokesperson.

Twitter outlined similar plans recently

Twitter already revealed some plans to tackle issues with location-based features in an analyst day presentation recently. The company also ran a test in a few major cities with new users who were shown a bunch of tweets tied to the location from where they registered themselves on Twitter. It was observed that users who were shown location-based content were more likely to log into their Twitter accounts in the next 30 days compared to the ones who were not shown the content.

An executive at Twitter stated, “Our goal is to take those learning’s and scale them to the rest of the world.”

He added that they were looking forward to nailing two key location-based components. The first one was to figure out the location from where content came, and the second is understanding the places a user cared about. They want to know when you are accessing Twitter where are you standing and whether is it your home country or some other place on the globe that drew your attention.

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