Some months ago, Twitter enabled the ability to pin a place to tweets—in this case the location the user happened to be at—but there were rumors circulating about a capability called “Points of Interest”. Now they’re rolling out an API enhancement that will permit people to search those place tags to reveal tweets sent about or from them. Today, we at SiliconANGLE received a communiqué for the Twitter developer community about this development.

From the e-mail,

This summer we started letting users add a place to a Tweet. Since then we’ve seen that people want to tweet about a variety of places, from businesses to parks to neighborhoods.

We have been working with a number of partners to grow our data set of places to make it easier for you to build great Twitter experiences around places, and offer more place choices to users. These partnerships serve as a foundation for a number of exciting features we have planned to help users find what’s new in their area and around the world.

To make it easy for you to use the large data set, we’re using an index that combines the IDs across different partners into one. This means you can use the IDs from your preferred partner’s dataset when using Twitter Search to find Tweets about a specific place.

The Twitter places API involves a set of providers who produce place data that can be attacked to tweets. Amid them are A&E Television, probably adding historic places and landmarks, Gowalla, TomTom, and many others. This new API will permit developers to add searches to their web, mobile, and desktop apps to allow users to reveal tweets connected to a particular place.

The upshot of this will be when a person is using a Twitter app on their mobile, at the press of a button they could see the tweets sent from or about that place adding an extra social dimension to visiting the place. In fact, they could join a conversation about it as a result.

As people, we’re not just stuck in one place all our lives. We move around, discover the world, and interact with one another across both the Internet and in the public square. While adding “Points of Interest” to tweets months ago seemed quaint, now that it’s possible to find and collate them, they can become part of combining geography, the Internet, and social discourse.

If you’re a Twitter developer, you can discover more about this API from the Twitter development site.