Twitter are rolling out a new service which will allow you to see the location of where tweets are sent from.  Twitter places is currently being rolled out to 65 countries..  On a tweet you will be able to click on ‘place’ and view where the location of the tweet has come from if it is tagged.  Cool new feauture?  You will also then be able to look to see what other tweets are in this area.

Foursquare is a growing mobile location based service where you can checkin where you are and see who else is checked in, view recommendations on places and lots more.  It will be interesting to see how far twitter develops in this area.  Location based services is going to be big but will the likes of twitter and/or facebook (who have also plans in this area) take market share from foursquare, gowalla and others.

So, how can a business take advantage of twitters location based service, here are 7 ideas:

1. You can click on a tweet in a particular location and see other tweets tagged for this location.  Handy if you are business in the area and you want to promote services to people close to you.  What about a coffee shop enticing people in, in the morning.

2. How about a courier service that hasn’t really invested in technology using twitter to get their guys to send a tweet when they have done a delivery and they can track exactly where they are.  If they partner up with other courier companies maybe they could find out if there was another courier company with a courier in the area of pick up that they could use.

3. You are at an event and you want to meet new people.  You could track who has tweeted and where they tweeted from (alternative to using an event hashtag).

4. You monitor tweets from employees that are out sick and see if they are sending them from a home address!

5.  Twitter are working closely with TomTom (GPS navigation).  What about automatically sending tweets with your location details built in as you travel on a long journey so your family can keep track of you and also know when you arrived safely.

6.  Twitter are allowing you to add this functionality to your own applications.  Maybe a car alarm system would alert you with a tweet if the car changes location?

7.  Tweetup’s is where a gang of twitter people decide to meet up.  Maybe there will be random tweetups with people that are in a particular area at any time.

They were just my initial thoughts but I’d be interested to hear any wild or whacky or even useful ideas?

Anybody got any ideas?