Twitter-Square: Places

Yesterday at Twitter’s Chirp Conference, the company’s first ever developers conference, CEO Evan Williams announced a new, somewhat monumental feature: Places. As you may have guessed, Places allows you to share your location with others (with your permission of course).

Although, Places sounds somewhat novel, the feature does a lot more than just report your location. Once you’ve posted your location on Twitter, you and your followers will be able to instantly see other tweets from that same location.

Hmm… sound familiar? It’s because Places essentially mimics other services such as Fourquare and Gowalla. Oddly enough, the two companies seem pretty OK with the whole deal.

Here’s what the “head honchos” had to say:

Foursquare’s CEO

I’ve always thought we were complementary. We’ve been talking with these guys and working with them on ways we can both make better use of the overlap of the focus on location. Tweeting from a place is different than a checkin. Lots of products use location to encourage conversation and Twitter entering the space just makes those conversations more interesting.

Gowalla’s CEO

Gowalla already allows you to push your location to Twitter, and we’re looking to deepen our integration to make sharing place related tags with Twitter even easier. In fact, I believe a significant portion of place-related tags attached to tweets will ultimately be generated from Gowalla.We believe there are times that you’re going to want to share where you are in a broad sense through a service like Twitter — and we want to provide the best product to do that with. Other times, you’re going to want to share with a select group of people — and we want that experience to be remarkable in Gowalla as well.

So according to Evan William, Twitter’s not trying to kill of Foursquare. They claim they want to “complement it.” We’re not so sure.

We’ll be testing out the new feature shortly– stay tuned for our impressions!

Via: Business Week