At the 140 Twitter Conference yesterday, Alex Payne, Twitter’s API lead told Robert Scoble that Twitter might soon add location-based information to every tweet. Currently, users can set a location on their profile, but individual tweets are not geo-coded in any way. If Twitter did indeed add a geo-references to every tweet, then that would open up the door to a wealth of new possibilities for developers. Suddenly, for example, it would be possible to develop an application that could pull in every tweet ever made from a certain restaurant or bar.
In addition, Payne also told Scoble that Twitter will add a new feature similar to Friendfeed‘s ‘likes,’ as well as comments. On Friendfeed, users can ‘like’ any comment to push it back up to the top of the page. Twitter’s current system of ‘favorites’/stars is probably not a heavily used feature (something Twitter’s own FAQ acknowledges) and it is hard to see why one would favorite a post except as a replacement for bookmarking. The data about which tweets were starred is also not surfaced in any meaningful way.
Comments would be a very interesting addition to Twitter, as they could basically constitute a replacement for the use of the @ reply. Other micro-blogging services like Plurk or the new defunct Rejaw used comments and they make it a lot easier to keep track of conversations.
Scoble also got a chance to chat with Anamitra Banerji, who is actually working on Twitter’s commercial products. Banerji confirmed that Twitter is indeed trying to stay away from advertising based revenue models and is looking to sell data and features to businesses instead. Twitter believes that consumers are not very likely to buy premium features.
