Twitter Places: Now Your Tweets Can Tell Everyone Where You Are

Remember the first time you ever saw a commercial for text messages? You had just gotten a phone, it had some ringtones, it flipped open and shut, you love it. And you thought, "Now, that's the stupidest thing I have ever heard. I have a phone - it's portable - why the fuck wouldn't I just call?" And now, on your mom's birthday, you text, "I love you!" and she texts back "thx 4 the txt, i <3 u 2!!!!!" (Because moms not only text now, they text like fourteen year old girls.) Just keep that example mind for one second, ok?

Twitter Places! It's here! It's like Twitter, except you can not just express yourself in140 characters, you can tell everyone exactly where you are. And then, of course, if you're hip, you can sync it up with your other location-based social-media games and run around Tweeting about how you're the 4Square Mayor of the coffee shop down the street (take that, caffeine-addled neighbors!).

There will be some hand-wringing. Someone will say it's stupid, unnecessary, a sign of the end-times. And yes, the first-adopters will be annoyingly plugged-in hipster chicks and college freshman who seemingly have more Facebook friends than brain cells. But if location-based technology makes sense for anything, it's Twitter, since locations are only interesting in real-time, and Twitter is as real-time as it gets. Eventually it's going to mean a new business model for Twitter, which will like start making money off promotional tie-ins (Tweet from Starbucks fifty times, get a free veinte-frapa-whatever). And, while the value of Twitter for journalists and organized grassroots resistance is still being explored, there is surely something useful here too.

So, when you feel full of scorn, just remember the text message. And, like, Galileo.