Context has increasingly become a focus in technology. With so much information available on the Internet, it’s become important that humans create tools to filter and surface that information when and where it is relevant.
AllThingsD announced that Twitter has started testing new local discovery features and, if executed properly, it will be a game changer. The people, content, and gatherings around us are extremely relevant in day-to-day life and, given their proximity, it’s usually pretty easy to act upon any information related to them
In the article, the author writes that the new feature “lets you discover tweets from certain people within a certain distance of your location." It seems that the team behind Twitter Local, like a lot of other location-based social networks, is using distance as the determining factor for context. The underlying assumption is that tweets become more relevant within closer proximity to your current location. The assumption is logical, but distance strips a lot of context about where the tweets were created.
For instance, I work in DUMBO Brooklyn, which is home to a lot of tech. startups and creative agencies. The Financial District in Manhattan is only about 1 mile away across the East River, but that small river represents a huge cultural gap between the two locations. On the other hand, Williamsburg Brooklyn is about 1.5 miles away, but is much more comparable culturally to DUMBO (and easily accessible by ferry). Personally, I’m not as interested in seeing the tweets from bankers on Wall St. as I am about seeing the tweets from people in Williamsburg (or anywhere in Brooklyn really).
Distance doesn’t take into account the culture, ideas, and issues that surround the location the tweets were created in. In fact the distance only really gives you an idea of the time it would take to travel there. Organizing tweets by location (i.e. DUMBO, Financial District) would not only provide more contextual tweets, but also provide a better way for Twitter users to engage in a conversation and see tweets from locations all over the world!
As of now there aren’t many good tools for location-based discovery and communication, and that is the core problem my team has been working to solve at Echolocation. There is a big opportunity for Twitter to become a solution to that problem, similar to how Twitter has launched a product for discovering music, but it is essential that they consider the shortcomings that distance has in location-based social networks.