Twitter has allowed users in the U.S. to tweet their location via its Places feature for a while now, but recent developments show that Places may be taking it a step further by letting businesses “claim” a location or place.
The “claiming” of Place pages could be a sign that Twitter is getting serious about competing in the geolocation space currently dominated by Facebook and Foursquare. It could give businesses, particularly resorts, a new avenue to promote themselves on Twitter, and it could lead to new revenue possibilities for the microblogging service.
Place pages are nothing new; Places launched in June and the updated Place pages were likely part of the launch of the New Twitter. However, the “claimed by” feature is something we have never seen before. We’ve only found one location (Twitter HQ claimed by @Twitter) that has been claimed so far, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that Twitter is testing the feature with a limited set of partners.
Twitter responds, “Claiming Twitter Places is not available at this time. We’re experimenting with a variety of features. Allowing businesses to claim a Place is a natural thing to consider for the future.”
It looks like this feature is indeed in testing, though not with businesses quite yet. It makes a lot of sense, though, that Twitter would want claiming a Place to be an integrated feature of Places.
They may not be rolling out this feature yet for Australia but if it’s slowly being used in the United States, then it won’t be long before we can make use of this service.
