John McCrory

What is the #1 most significant implication of the new geotagging option in Twitter? It enables you to tell people where you are in real time, right? WRONG. It’s more significant than Google Latitude, Loopt, or other “presence” applications.

Why? Because one of the most intriguing opportunities created by Twitter’s new option for geotagging one’s tweets is the ability to place virtual notes in public spaces for other people to find. Since a tweet can include a link, I can place all kinds of content in that location — a video or audio, a blog post, a picture. The possibilities are endless.

For example, I could visit the Lincoln Memorial and record an Audioboo about how, in the 1960s, my mother used to stand on steps with a sign saying, simply, “Equal Opportunity in Housing” and how some of the visitors to the Memorial would spit at her. (Better yet, I’d record her telling the story, ahead of time.) While standing in front of the statue of Abe Lincoln, I could post a tweet with a link to that Audioboo, and with it geotagged, it would then be placed there for others to find.

The natural next step for geotagged tweets is a tool for discovering tweets in a given place. Someone might then be able to visit the Lincoln Memorial, take out a smartphone or other digital device and “sniff” for tweets geotagged to that spot. They could listen to my mother’s story. They could watch a youtube video of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech.

A person could then cross the street to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and discover tweets about the people whose names are on that wall, audio and video reminiscences by their family members, and so on. The point? Real-world space can now be layered with media in all kinds of interesting and moving ways.

The concept of attaching virtual content to actual spaces isn’t new, of course. David Gelernter described something like this in Mirror Worlds nearly 20 years ago (motivating the Unabomber to target him). However what Twitter’s geotagging promises would be the opposite of what he envisioned in that it would be lightweight, personal, and distributed. Various schemes have sprouted over the past two decades for using the internet to record information related to a specific place. I recall a company marketing a device that you could wave like a wand in front of a store window and get information about the place. Feel free to mention similar services in the comments.

What makes Twitter’s geotagging vastly different than earlier schemes is that it makes this potential universal, device independent, crowdsourced, and searchable — a very powerful combination.

Some ideas of how geotagging tweets could transform our day-to-day experience:

• I could walk down a street looking for a place to have lunch, and then search for tweets by people who’d dined at restaurants I walked by to see their reviews. Imagine if the local newspaper geotagged tweets to all of its restaurant reviews so I could find them in real space.
• I could create a virtual scavenger hunt by leaving Twitter clues in specific places. Real-time treasure hunts could give new meaning to “following” someone on Twitter. I imagine a brand of liquor might create a bar-crawl scavenger hunt that “follows” someone–a character, a model, a celebrity–who represents the brand and leads explorers through a weekly expedition.
• I could walk down a street and see Tweets about special deals and sales from stores on that street.
• I could stand on a corner and search for real-time geotagged tweets from nearby bus and subway stops to find them and know how many minutes it will be until the next bus or train arrives
• I could visit my grandmother’s grave and read Twitter messages from other family members who’d been there.
• If I were a delivery person, I could check Twitter at a given address to see if there were warnings about a mean dog.
• Imagine if the local newspaper geotagged tweets to its archive of news stories… I could walk down a block in Manhattan and see all the New York Times articles about events, people, buildings, and businesses on that block.

There are disturbing possibilities, as well. A restaurant owner could leave fake negative “reviews”  at competitors’ restaurants. An abusive boyfriend might leave derogatory messages or compromising pictures at an ex-girlfriend’s house. Porn and spam tweets can be littered everywhere. A racist might virtually spit at my mother again, 50 years after she stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial. But these are problems that the open forum of the Internet has to deal with in any case.

There are limitations in how accurate location data can be. In dense urban areas, the GPS accuracy (typically 50 feet or less in non-urban places) is not as good. But in most cases the typical GPS accuracy will be fine. Add to that the volume of geotagging that may occur and many places will get extremely crowded with contributed content. It’s clear that geotagged search will be a hugely interesting challenge in the next few years. Hashtags to categorize these geotagged stickynote tweets will likely arise from users. There will need to be a way for users to mark certain geotagged tweets as spam or porn, to offer corrections and comments, rate tweets, or otherwise “grade ” the content of a tweet or what it points to.

The possibilities are endless, exciting, and boggle the mind. But I think Twitter may succeed with this kind of location-based virtual stickynote where previous attempts failed — and it’s going to be very interesting, challenging, and fun. I’d love to hear your ideas for how to use this new feature. Please share them in the comments.