Twitter acquires Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI

by Jay Hathaway (RSS feed) Dec 24th 2009 at 9:06AM


Twitter's foray into geolocation just got a lot more serious with the company's acquisition of Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. 

GeoAPI allows developers to add geolocation features to their apps, and now it's going to help Twitter advance its location-based capabilities. This is good news for developers of third-party Twitter apps, too, because the new API will enable them to use location data in new ways.

Twitter is pretty vague about what improvements GeoAPI will bring to the table, but it's clear that they're pushing for users to geotag their tweets. I suspect that part of GeoAPI's role will be to make geotagging as easy as possible for Twitter's userbase to adopt. As Twitter's Ev Williams says in his blog post on the subject, "twittering "Earthquake!" alone is not as informative as "Earthquake!" coupled with your current location.

Twitter developers get new geolocation tools to play with, users get new features, and Twitter gets even more data that it can potentially analyze and sell. Meanwhile, the Mixer Labs team gets hired on at Twitter. 

Sounds like a win-win-win-win situation to me.