I’ve come up with an idea for Twitter’s next step in micro-blogging that includes geolocation technology. With the amount of companies jumping in on the location data, telling you of sales and promos in your immediate area, I think its time to reverse that trend. What if you could tweet to only people within 50 feet of you? Or 50 miles?
The basic concept is this: using your iPhone or Smart Phone twitter app, you select how wide of a range your tweets go. So if you’re, say, standing on a street corner in the rain waiting for a bus you just missed, you could quickly tweet “Need a ride to downtown, currently on the corner of Main and First”, and select a range of 100 feet, and if anyone in that area has their phone picking up tweets, and has the ‘anyone in my area can tweet me’ selected, then they will get the message! That was a long sentence thought.
How cool would it be to just be sitting in a coffee shop, tweet something like ‘Everyone yell HELLO to the next person to walk into Carl’s Coffee’, and see the reaction. This could be a great way to network offline using online methods. I mean, normally you tweet and anyone in the world can see it, but what if it is limited to 10 feet?? You could have sudden random meetups of people who just happened to be around that area. That would make passing notes in class irrelevant, because you could just tweet to people in one room.
The possibilities are endless!
Just a note: If this already exists, then I apologize. This is news to me. And someone please tell me. Soon. Because I could make a fool of myself trying to tell people about this.