76% of Twitter is on Mobile, but where are they?
Why “Tweets Near Me” needs to be baked into the service.
Twitter has always been the network of discovery. When Facebook was the place for friends and family, Twitter was the place to connect with people you never knew, to hear news before it breaks, and to level the playing field for those with something of interest to say.
S0 far in 2014 Twitter has been finding ways to combat Facebook, and adding features that are less and less differentiated (photo albums, messages, etc)…I propose launching a new feature that would return back to twitter’s original success with discovery and enable opt-out geotagging — Tweets near me.
Tweets near me would leverage Twitter’s high mobile installs and allow users to see tweets within a physical radius of their location through geotags.
I know some people will tell me that Twitter already allows you to search tweets nearby, and that they’ve tested a nearby tweets map in the past. However, the current iteration is hidden deep within a series of search filters and their test has been limited to a small set of users who have opted-in; The ability is there, but the accessibility is not.
That’s why Twitter should launch their own geo-filtered feed for tweets nearby and bake it into their mobile offering in addition to the home, discover, and activity screens.
Of course, baking in the feature would require mass adoption of geotagged tweets, something current users must turn on manually. However, Twitter has reached a point where most users understand that the network is public rather than private(Last reported, less than 10% of users had protected accounts), and because of this I believe geotags can switch to an opt-out process rather than opt-in.
I know some people will scream big brother, but the reality is if you want a private conversation then you should use a service other than Twitter. I’m not suggesting including detailed location data on a map — but rather providing filters for tweets within a radius (and keeping exact locations private).
Not only would the move return twitter to its strength in discovering what’s around you , but Tweets near me would open up the avenue for future monetization. Given their recent IPO, automatically including location data would yield opportunities for targeted advertising that Twitter is sure to move towards anytime now.
Who knows if Twitter already tested the feature and put it on their roadmap… but it would be a welcome addition to my Twitter feed, and a way to return to the service’s core product of realtime discovery.
