How do you feel about Foursquare and Gowalla? It may be about to get a lot less annoying. Granted, I'm in the group of people that sits on the sidelines thinking that perhaps Foursquare and Gowalla could be a bit cool but also angrily grumbles about both appearing unhelpfully in Twitter streams, but this is a bit cool regardless. Today it's big news and you may have heard the news to solve this: Twitter has created Twitter Places - and integrated it with Foursquare and Gowalla. It'll be rolling out to 65 countries around the world and appearing in an "Add your location" link form.

In the same way that Twitter allows geo-tagging tweets (which, whilst not massively interesting allows me to say, view the different counties I travel through on the way to work), we're going to be able to do it a lot more specifically and easily now. Also, you can adjust quite how creepy the tags are: whether you want to say your exact distance

In the same way that the two services currently work, clicking on a Twitter Place will bring up related tweets. This is incredibly similar to the 'tips' users can currently leave in areas, but now it's all a bit more streamline and can be linked with Places.

Will this mean the end of Foursquare and Gowalla in the same way that Twitter's shortening URL may spell the end (questionably) for other URL shorteners. Probably not. Personally, this would tempt me to try them. As an on-the-fence user, I've been thinking about using it for a while and with this recent integration is might just be the swaying point - perhaps only out of nosiness. On the whole though, it merely means that geo-tagging's spreading, and developers can integrate it within their .. developments - but most importantly perhaps the high rate of "Name has checked in here" will end. We can only hope.

If you're feeling very keen, you can follow @Geo for geo-specific updates.