Twitter Places Getting Ready To Stake Its Claim?

About five months ago Twitter launched Twitter Places to provide tweets with more “context.” Matt covered it with enthusiasm and imagined its potential: the marriage of location and real-time communication.

But nothing much has really happened since that time. There have been lots of geotagged tweets but Twitter still isn’t all that useful as a local search tool.  And it’s tough to find “Places” on Twitter. In the meantime Facebook launched Places, which is more functional and does a better job of marrying real-time communication and location to date.

Now it appears that Twitter is considering allowing businesses to claim their locations, as they can on Google and Facebook. (See image below.) Twitter would need to contend with the same thing that Facebook confronts: the presence of a Place Page and a Fan Page (in this case a Twitter Place and a business’ Twitter account). The only claimed location on Twitter right now is apparently Twitter HQ:

Twitter provided a statement earlier to Mashable about the status of claiming Places on Twitter.

Claiming Twitter Places is not available at this time. We’re experimenting with a variety features. Allowing businesses to claim a Place is a natural thing to consider for the future.

As mentioned, Twitter would join Google, Facebook and Yelp as sites where claiming a listing is useful or important for local businesses (and nationals with local stores). Yet each one aims to be both a marketing platform and a kind of CRM tool for local business owners. However, the more sites that ask business owners to claim listings the more challenging and confusing it becomes for them.