Twitter is testing a new feature that will let mobile users have an idea of who are also tweeting near them.
Reports reveal that those who allow Twitter to plot and use their locations have seen the "Nearby" tweets timeline that feature local tweets even of people that they do not follow.
The said feature might help Twitter be more locally relevant and compete with other services such as Foursquare. It can also help brands deliver more relevant ads to potential customers.
"The new experiment appears to try to solve the problem that the "discover" tab and search function have struggled to do: organize the millions of tweets into something digestible and locally relevant for each user," wrote Yoree Koh for The Wall Street Journal, that first reported about "Nearby" tweets.
Based on the report, the Nearby timeline features a blue marker that indicates the location of the user while the lower half of the screen feeds tweets from users in the area. Clicking on icons of other users will pull their tweets forward.
Users can also browse the map and just like how it works for Google Maps, the experimental Twitter service will show tweets as they are posted in real-time. This might be the company's answer for people who love to search and discover on the microblogging platform.
"Maybe they'll come across something that will be incrementally interesting to some advertisers," analyst Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research told The Wall Street Journal.
The new move however might stir up some privacy issues. Users have been allowed to add their location on Twitter since 2010, but this feature has been off as default. Posting local or geographically nearby tweets might expose those who do not want to be publicly seen. Of course, users can always turn off the location service option in their smartphones, if they want to keep their location private.
Right now. the details are very limited about the new feature and Twitter has not commented yet nor revealed details about the experimental service. The "Nearby" feature can be just another experiment of Twitter as part of its evolutionary process and its attempt to improve user experience. Similar features have been present for quite some time now with third party applications such as Tweetbot and Tweetcaster. China's Weibo and Weixin, both microblogging platforms, also have similar features.
Shares of Twitter closed 6.63 percent up at $59.00 on the NYSE on Friday.
