Twitter Places launches with Foursquare integration

Twitter has expanded their location service with the ability for users to check in to specific places, a la Foursquare venues. The new service is fittingly dubbed “Places.”

Foursquare checkins sent to Twitter will soon automatically be tagged with the specific venue instead of the more general city Foursquare tweets are now tagged with. Twitter says they’ve worked closely with Foursquare (and Gowalla) to integrate the two services tightly.

From the Twitter website, users will be able to click a location in a tweet to see real-time tweets from that venue. Twitter is touting the service as a way to keep track of the World Cup by tracking the tweets from within the individual World Cup stadiums. You’ll see tweets from that location as well as the Foursquare and Gowalla checkins there (at least the ones shared with Twitter).

It looks like this will be a good partnership for Foursquare as the product expands and Foursquare becomes a provider of the location information it contains. Twitter doesn’t appear to be taking this step to directly compete with Foursquare, but as a way to add more context to tweets. There are no badges, mayorships, points or even tips in Twitter’s offering — simply the same tweets as before with an added bit of granularity in the location field.

You can learn more about using Twitter Places on their website in this help document.