Twitter Turns Tuesday Into Testing and Tweaking Time

Twitter, the micro-blogging service and social media company founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone among others, has seen steady growth month over month and a combined growth over the past year of 294.26%.

So, if you are a social media networking site with 23 million unique visitors, what do you do to attract a revenue stream and more users? Apparently, spend a day testing out some new features and updates. And that is just what they spent today doing.

Twitter spent Tuesday doing some experimentation and some tweaking.  These appeared and then disappeared like a blip on the radar.

One of the changes? Modifying the “update” button to “tweet,” seemingly to signify that it’s official.  Those of you sending out those 140 character message aren’t twittering but in fact “tweeting.” It only took the stats to rise to 50 million tweets per day for them to make the update, but even then, only momentarily. It was noticed by a few and TechCrunch sent out a post regarding it, but at the time of this post, it still remains “update.”

In an attempt to timidly enter the location wars, Twitter turned on the geolocation function on its website.  TechCrunch featured small screenshots of tweets with small location place markers, displaying a Google map showing the location of the tweet when a user hovered over it. This feature has also been deactivated since TechCrunch’s post broke the news and screenshots.

Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since November, but until today, there was no indication that Twitter was looking to fully integrate geolocation into the main website.  Twitter has timed this move well, with the report from the New York Times earlier today that Facebook has finally decided to enter the location war by unveiling its response next month at its f8 conference.  Coincidentally (or not), Twitter’s inaugural Chirp conference takes place 1 week before the f8 conference. Google is trying to get into the location war as well, but has made a disappointing debut thus far with meager offerings through Buzz and Latitude.  Of course, each day it seems Twitter is bursting with the buzz of the new and shiny app of the day to throw their hat into the ring of the location wars.  Most of the new apps are passing information back to Twitter, leveraging Twitter’s geolocation API, which further supports the timing and logic of Twitter to turn this function on within their own website.

UPDATE: It appears as though Twitter has launched these features or they are doing additionally testing. Either way, as of 6:45 pm CST, the location feature and the “Tweet” button are both live based on the screenshots below:

Written by: Sara Paxton, managing partner, CTO, and Social Media Officer of Evans Media Group, Kansas City’s Social Media Agency, a boutique agency located in Overland Park, KS that specializes in traditional marketing, social media marketing, online marketing, and public relations.