Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder, announced in a blog post yesterday that a location based API will soon be made available to Twitter apps developers. In addition geolocation functionality will be made available on the platform itself in the future which means that tweets can then be geo-tagged.

Location based tweets could prove a very valuable addition to the service adding a very interesting dynamic. "For example, with accurate, tweet-level location data you could switch from reading the tweets of accounts you follow to reading tweets from anyone in your neighborhood or city-whether you follow them or not. It\'s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake. There will likely be many use cases we haven\'t even thought of yet which is part of what makes this so exciting," said Stone.

Who knows we may even see a location column on TweetDeck in the near future. The big issue however is what a location aware Twitter means for other location based services.  From a privacy perspective the functionality will be disabled by default on the Twitter platform. Further the company has assured users that it won't hold onto location data for extended periods, whatever that means.