Twitter has finally, after an announcement earlier this fall, thrown the switch on an API allowing for Tweets to carry a tag for your specific location where the Tweet is sent from. Here’s the setting:

This means all sorts of potential uses, from even more specific community uses to a very robust search angle (ReadWrite Web does a great run-down here). For now we’ll have to watch as the first to bat roll out the feature in third-party applications – Twitter hasn’t actually devoted any new features on their own website toward the feature. In fact, even their more powerful search tool (based on Summize, R.I.P.) still bears the older location-search based on the city users name in their account.

One of my questions with the opt-in model is whether opt-In refers only to whether my Tweets communicate to the public where I am—in other words, does Twitter have a way to know where I am even if I’m not including it in my Tweets? Before last week they tweaked the privacy policies of Twitter users to nod to Geotagging:

“You may choose to note your location in your Tweets and in your Twitter profile. You can control your location information in your account settings.”

Seems clear that it truly is turned off from a Tweet standpoint- but is there an angle where you have not chosen to make information public but Twitter could still collect it? In Twitter’s policies there is an interesting line:

“Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.”

Huh. “Most.” Hmm.

“We engage certain trusted third parties to perform functions and provide services to us. We may share your personal information with these third parties, but only to the extent necessary to perform these functions and provide such services, and only pursuant to obligations mirroring the protections of this privacy policy.”

A thorough description of Geotagging on Twitter exists on their Zendesk help forums here. In it one can find a few key phrases that aren’t as comforting:

“Anyone can see it: even if you delete it, we cannot guarantee it will be removed from every partner.”

Translation: Twitter has “partners” that will be caching (or already are) your Tweets. Note the language change here – they specifically refer to “apps” and “application developers” prior to this in the piece, but in this line they use the word “partner” explicitly. Given recent announcements by Microsoft, Google and just last week Yahoo, this bodes well for the longevity of Tweets being extended beyond the short shelf life they have now.

“Turning it off does not remove historical data. You can, however, remove all of your prior data.”

Translation: Twitter sees a distinction between “historical” data and “prior” data. This may seem confusing, but it’s an important point when you look at it in context of the “partner” comment—Twitter may not be the one archiving its history.

In the section, “How do I remove location information from a tweet?” they instruct:
There are two options for removing location data:

“Delete the tweet”

or:

“Remove all of your location history by clicking the ‘delete all location data’ button on your settings page. This can take up to 30 minutes, but it will scrub all location information from prior tweets completely. It is good to note, however, that this does not guarantee the information will be removed from all 3rd party application’s copies of the data.”

Translation: If it takes 30 minutes, this means they have to scrub the location from each Tweet, insofar as a “Tweet” is an archived and distinct piece of data that has several moving parts. It does make me wonder whether this signals an opportunity to have discrete parts to Geotagging rather than just the binary on or off. For example, perhaps I just want to indicate the city rather than my exact location (and don’t want to go through the tedious process of updating my account profile every time)? This kind of nuance has been available with Brightkite for years now, it will be interesting to see where Twitter goes and how quickly others like Foursquare can adapt and incorporate.

Geolocation is certainly a good thing, and exactly what we knew Twitter had to add. Watch how fast Facebook starts pulling back the curtain on what they’re working on. But in the meantime: Does all this mean custom ads based on Geolocation? Tweeting habits crunched and analyzed by Twitter and “partners” for all sorts of advances? Lots of ways this could shake down. Grabm your popcorn folks and watch what plays out as the app developers scramble to let your holiday travel Tweets tell us you’ve gone over the river and through the woods…

-Dean (@dbrowell)