According to Robert Scoble who was liveblogging Alex Payne’s presentation at the 140 Twitter Conference, it looks like Twitter will be adding location-based information into each short-form messages that comes out of the site.

Here’s what Robert Scoble wrote:

“He told me they are going to add features that look like friendfeed’s “likes” and “comments.” But he said they would be different, though. Also, during his talk at #140TC he told the audience they would make other changes to support search, including adding location based info to each Tweet.”

via Twitter’s Alex Payne told me that Twitter will be… – Robert Scoble – FriendFeed.

What it means: the introduction of location information into every Twitter message is a definite building block for a very powerful Twitter local search engine that will mine not only user and merchant activities but also news.

Update: now Scoble is liveblogging the presentation from Anamitra Banerji, one of the product managers at Twitter.   “There’s lots of interesting things they could do, he says, around how they filter things that come in.  Categories, types of businesses. Ahh, they ARE thinking about how to get onto Google’s table. Do a search for “Palo Alto Sushi” on Google. Now imagine how a list like that could be used by Twitter. ” I think it’s sufficient proof that Twitter is thinking that local will be key to their future success.