Could Twitter bake-in location and earn?

Florian wrote an interesting post on Pat’s blog about how Twitter could squeeze revenue by becoming a broadcast network of sorts. I’ve got a different take or rather something else that could work alongside Florian’s suggestion.

So, the idea comes from Twitter adopting Twinkle’s location-based approach. Twitter ate up Summize as it became the defacto search, how about it swallows location-based filtering and charges companies for using it for power marketing?

Serve me

Service industry companies that use Twitter could florish. Imagine having a leak and that there are a thousand plumbers on Twitter. The beauty of Twitter is that it is global. However, in this particular situation, a plumber in Derby won’t sort my leak in Dublin. What if Twitter gave us the option of sharing our locations and served them up (like Twinkle does) as part of the API call?

Searching for someone

Say if I’m looking for a plumber in Dublin, how could this work in with location switched on? Twitter could go with the flat bio search like:

Poss Twitter Location Search on

The search would work off users’ default location. If a user does not want to share their location, they can still search for services using syntax like:

Poss Twitter Location Search off

Perhaps, in the future, Twitter could offer a distinction between non-commercial and commercial accounts. Want to promote your plumbling service on Twitter? Sign up as one and give yourself a location with a radius of service areas. Indexing a search based on location is much easier than a flat bio search. Adding commercial accounts could make it easier for Twitter to formulise how power users pay for Twitter.

Opting in, opting out

The only way this could work is if people share their locations freely. That location box in your Twitter profile is key if you are web-bound. Being able to autofill it via IP could work, but the web/client user could manually fill it if their location is not specific enough or too specific for their liking.  Mobile location identification would work similarly, but with increased accuracy. Opt-out is also possible. User privacy is paramount and their right not to be spammed needs to be on the minds of Twitters Powers That Be. Spammers would leech a system if left unpoliced.

Counting the cost

Power commercial users of the location-based API calls via third-party Twitter clients or roll their own apps would pay a fee if they want to market to local users. The fee could be based on number of API calls and followers they have, as progragation of their tweets can be costly.

Small and medium-sized businesses would pay little or nothing.  Of course, Twitter might like to jump on the Google sponsored link pimp approach too, but I don’t think it adds to result relevance.

In this way, Twitter becomes less about the content and is just a communications network. A gateway for short messaging with a local twist.

January 19th, 2009 at 12:17 pm • Filed in Geekery



Comments

2 Comments to “Could Twitter bake-in location and earn?”

  1. Joe Scanlon Says:
    January 19th, 2009 at 6:27 pm

    Great suggestion



  2. Daniel Brierton Says:
    January 20th, 2009 at 11:46 am

    Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. C’mon Twitter, finally monetize your business



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