Geolocation Chatter Continues

The discussion volume for geolocation continues to be turned up. The latest example is the geolocation panel that took place at TechCrunch’s Real Time Crunchup on Friday. If you missed it, you can see the entire session here.

If you don’t have time, start at minute 30 for some of the meaty discussion about adding geotargeted ads into social tools (mobile and desktop), such as Twitter and Google Latitude.

The gist of the discussion is how we’re in early days for the technology that enables location awareness in search products on the desktop and mobile device. Eventually, it will become a commodity for various apps and Twitter mashups.

This gets us past traditional online geotargeting that is based on IP address or geographic search queries. More automatic location tags that are appended to things like Twitter streams open up opportunities for users to search for nearby trending topics, and advertisers to target nearby customers.

I spent some time talking to Twitter Senior Product Manager Anamitra Banerji this morning. There are lots of things Twitter is beginning to develop that make it a more effective local discovery engine. The basic idea is that location is inherent in the question of “what’s happening?”

As such, it will provide an additional dimension of relevance to tweets. This isn’t anything new, as location information could previously be indexed in Twitter’s search results and trending topics. The difference is that it’s primarily been done by filtering geographic keywords within tweets — not automatically geotagging the origin of a tweet.

There are other possibilities we’ve explored in the past, and we’ll continue the discussion at the Interactive Local Media conference next month. Banerji will join us in a panel discussion on the colliding worlds of local and social. We’ll also have Facebook’s Tim Kendall, Citysearch’s Kara Nortman and AT&Ti’s Greg Isaacs. Hope to see you there.