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One of the major features of many iPhone apps is location awareness. Thanks to the GPS of iPhone 3G or wifi/hotspot triangulation of the original iPhone, apps can use the location of the iPhone to add value to their functionality. All three twitter apps available in the iTunes App Store are location aware, although they have different ways of using locations. I’m going to compare the location aware functionality of these apps: Twitterific, Twittelator and Twinkle. There are many differences between these apps but I’m just going to talk about their location based features.
Twitterific’s location based feature is simple: when you create a twitter you press the crosshair icon (like the locator button in Google Maps) and your current location becomes the location associated with your Twitter profile, expressed as coordinates that be searched for in Google Maps.
Pros: Your location is available to all twitter users with access to your profile regardless of the client they’re using. In twitterific, a user’s location is clickable and will open up a Google Maps search for that location.
Cons: Your profile location is wherever you were when you posted a tweet in Twitterific and hit the locater button. There’s no way of knowing if that’s where you are now, or were yesterday or last year. There’s also no way of changing your location from Twitterific without replacing it with your current location. If you wanted to revert back to your default location of, say, San Francisco, CA, you would have to do so on the web (you can’t edit your profile in Twitterific).
Verdict: The only situation in which this implementation makes sense is one in which you are tweeting in every location you arrive at, and don’t mind everybody knowing exactly where you are. Otherwise there’s no way of knowing where you sent any particular tweet from, or where you are now.
Twittelator’s tweet creation screen features a button that inserts a link into your tweet that points to a Google Maps search for your coordinates.
Pros:Your location is available to all twitter users with access to your profile regardless of the client they’re using. Location is tweet based so your followers know exactly where you were when the tweet was posted.
Cons: The map link, though short, does take up some of your available tweet characters.
Verdict: Twittelator is great when your location is information you want to draw attention to in your tweet, and you want to share it with all followers.
Twinkle sends your posts first to it’s own Tapulous service (which you need to register for to use the app) and to Twitter. You can then go to the “nearby” screen to see pings (Twinkle’s name for tweets) from Tapulous users who are within a distance that you choose.
Pros: Seeing tweets that have been sent close to your current location is a great feature. You can see what’s going on around you wherever you happen to be. This also creates a community based solely on location - you become the follower of all tweets recently posted near you even though the posters are complete strangers. Best of all your location becomes useful to others without you sharing exactly where you are, just that your are nearby.
Cons: Location only sharable with other Twinkle users. No way of sharing your location with followers who are not nearby.
Verdict: The nearby functionality is unique and ingenious, but rendered a lot less useless by the fact that it only shows you other Twinkle users.
Overall I would say Twitterific’s location feature is the weakest (because your Twitter location is profile based rather than Tweet based), and Twittelator and Twinkle both partially succeed. If you want to use Twitter to know what complete strangers are doing in your area, choose Twinkle. If you want to share your exact location with all your followers, choose Twittelator. If location based functionality isn’t that important to you there are plenty of other factors to take into consideration, but I can’t help you there.