The last week of tech news has revolved around: Twitter, Foursquare, Apple, Google (who today announced Google Places) and Facebook (who announced communities yesterday and has F8 tomorrow).

The common threads across each of these: location and mobile.

As part of Google’s Places announcement – which introduces local advertising campaigns, custom QR codes, and a revamped Favorite Places program – they underscored the importance of local on their core business model:

1 in every 5 Google searches relates to location.

Over time – as hardware, software and search algorithms / relevance improve – local will represent an even more significant portion of search queries. And as we have seen with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and others, location will play increasingly important roles in our social experiences.

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