Will Twitter change the way we live in cities?

Will Twitter change the way we live in our cities, how we deal with emergencies in our urban centers, or how we affect change in city government?

Robert Goodspeed, a research analyst at the Boston Metropolitan Area Planning Council and blogger at the urban planning website Planetizen, writes that the key to making it useful on a hyper-local basis is the ability to do a geographic search – something that Twitter currently doesn't offer.

But the third-party applications are prospering, like Localtweeps.com.  "Placetweeters" are setting up, retweeting to followers everything that's happening in a certain geographic area.  Some tweeters even have kept tabs on how long the line is at a popular New York burger stand.

And social media like Twitter and Facebook are credited with playing at least a minor role in the recent anti-government protest in Moldova.

Read the full blog post here, and follow Soapbox on Twitter here.