Geotagging allowed Twitter users to add location information to their tweets in 2010.
Twitter introduced location features in 2010, allowing users to attach geographic coordinates to posts when they chose to share them. The coordinates could come from a mobile device’s positioning capabilities or from a selected place. This added a geographic layer to the otherwise text-centered service and supported location-based browsing and applications.
Geotagging is different from writing a place name in a tweet. A typed phrase such as “London” is ordinary text, while a geotag is structured location metadata associated with the post. Users could control whether location information was shared, and Twitter later provided ways to remove stored location data from posts. The feature should also not be confused with Twitter’s location field in a profile, which describes an account’s stated location rather than the place where an individual post was created.