subject: Going Places through the Social Media [print this page] Going Places through the Social Media Going Places through the Social Media
Gearing up for more challenges, Social media today is experimenting with new features and techniques everyday to make the user more curious and much more engaged in everything related to the internet. Adding to the exhaustive list of features, the Twitter platform has launched "Places", which is the location-sharing feature on the social media website. The innovative work of technology enables the user to tweet and know what people geographically around him are tweeting about.
Illustrating the technicalities through an example, a user on Twitter sitting in the playgrounds of the FIFA World Cup at South Africa tweets about the current game, and then does a quick search through his location enabled Twitter account, thereby receiving updates from everyone sitting in the playground and tweeting. With accurate, tweet location data the user could switch from reading the tweets of accounts he follows to reading tweets from anyone in the neighborhood or city irrespective of whether he follows them or not.
While Facebook is also not far behind in the chase to be the best, the famous social media website has also been actively testing multiple location products with implementations of various location features. Marketers have taken a keen interest in the development of the feature as it helps them to experiment with a plethora of newer ideas.
Adding a million users a day, the developers of the location features are positive that checking in at a location will be as popular as checking the statuses of your friend list. The popularity of the feature can already be felt with the users along the span of the latitude and the longitude searching for twitter updates in public places including the coffee shops, restaurants and bars to know what people around them are talking about. The product is also said to integrate with the two location service server giants Foursquare and Gowalla to make the service a killer feature.
The usage of the feature also triggers the creative instincts of anyone. People have expressed positive views about the feature and the benefits that it might have. The users believe that the tool can be of vital importance at the time of a natural calamity or disaster, serving as a way of informing people around you in case of a need or emergency. The tool can also be beneficial to spread across a message in the domain of advertising, which is particularly targeted to a niche area of marketing. The social media websites are currently working on the development of the location features for the mobile phones, for enhancement of usage of the same.
In today's day and age where the average human does not have the time to sit back and talk to his friends and acquaintances, the internet is one such medium which makes them stay connected. Staying in touch is something that is hard to do, but social media has made it possible to know exactly what's happening in the other part of the planet. And thanks to the location services offered by the social media websites, the world is a much, much smaller place.
