Tvider Blog

In August Twitter had announced that they were working on a new API that would provide developers with the ability to geotag tweets. Now, the Geotagging API is officially available and mentioned on the Twitter blog.

This release is unique in that it’s API-only which means you won’t see any changes on twitter.com.

The new geotagging capabilities can already be seen in certain third-party apps and might even come to the web interface sometime soon.

Twitter applications like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others are already supporting this new functionality in interesting ways that include geotagging your tweets and displaying the location from where a tweet was posted.

“The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations,” writes Twitter platform/API man Ryan Sarver in the blog post.

To activate the new feature, Twitter users must go to their Settings pages and click “Enable Geotagging.” For obvious privacy reasons, the feature is not automatically enabled.

Twitter is adding what could become a powerful new source for news.It is going to support location-based trends with a new application programming interface so that users can see what others nearby are tweeting about.

Twitter has indicated that its new “Trends API” will support queries for trends in a particular location.

Raffi Krikorian of Twitter’s Platform Team writes:

The one feature request that we’ve heard over and over, however, is “what’s going on where I am?” To answer that, we wanted to give you all a heads up regarding the new “Trends API” that we’re launching. This API will open up trending information that is specific to a number of locations around the world.

At a high level, there will be two new endpoints:

• an endpoint to give a listing of all locations that trends are

available for, and

• an endpoint to actually allow you to query by a specific location.

Twitter’s move to support location-based trends is sure to give developers an opportunity to further enhance existing mashups and applications that utilize Twitter’s API.

Find out more on Twitter’s API wiki here and here.