A source familiar with the matter told Business Insider that Twitter and Foursquare are looking to team up next year to add location features to tweets.
This move will coincide with Twitter's recent push to begin providing information to its users that are both interesting and relevant.
Twitter has been hiring employees for its location department, with David Blackman, a former Foursquare geo lead already with the company. At the company's website, there are also listed job openings for six more positions in geo engineering.
The location-based features could be launched by as early as the first quarter of next year. However, the exact details and expected product of the partnership between Twitter and Foursquare are not yet clear.
The location features for Twitter are currently limited. The social network can determine the location of the user upon signing up for the service, along with the location that the user enters in his or her profile. Being able to determine the location where a tweet originated could be a future feature that can be seen in Twitter.
A spokesperson for Twitter refused to confirm the partnership of the company with Foursquare. However, the spokesperson did note that Twitter views location as a "vehicle of discovery."
When the spokesperson was asked on the location features that Twitter is planning to launch, the response suggested tweet check-ins at venues similar to Foursquare, recommendations in local places and content organization for the current locations of users.
In a recently held analyst presentation, Twitter discussed some of the company's plans regarding geo-based features. A test was recently conducted within some major cities with new Twitter users, with the service showing the new users with several tweets that were related to the location where the user signed up for Twitter.
The findings from the test reveal that it was more likely for these new users to re-open their Twitter accounts within the first 30 days compared to the new users that did not receive such geo-based content.
"Our goal is to take those learnings and scale them to the rest of the world," an executive for Twitter said.
According to the executive, Twitter has two important components regarding their location features that they have to properly understand. The first component is the location where the content is originating and where the succeeding conversations are occurring. The second component is the places that are relevant and important to the users, including the location of the user upon accessing Twitter, the home country of the user, or any other place that has captured the interest of the user.
