You can now attach a place to a tweet on Twitter, such as the “Space Needle” or your favorite corner restaurant. You can also click a place within a tweet to see all the other recent tweets attached to that place, as well as Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins. The functionality will soon roll out for the Twitter iPhone app, as well as the API.
The big question for local news organizations: will tweets associated with places have a higher potential to be about the place — which has a higher potential to be newsworthy — instead of a random status update, like “I’m hungover?” In other words, will you feel more compelled to attach a place if you’re writing about it, allowing better filtering to identify news? Good question. We’ll know in a few weeks.