Twitter Acquires Mixer Labs To Step Up Geo-Location

Twitter CEO Evan Williams just announced on the company blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. In a nutshell, GeoAPI provides developers with the ability to query the world through services which include a reverse geocoder; deep data about 16 million businesses and tens of thousands of points of interest; a writable layer for developers to annotate the world and do complex geo-queries; and location-enabled media layers (e.g., Twitter and Flickr). Just recently, they added an iPhone SDK to speed up mobile development as well.

GeoAPI will be integrated directly into the Twitter API, speeding up Twitter’s efforts

in the geo-location space. In August 2009, Twitter first announced that they’re getting into the geo-location game as well. And, in September, a lot of you started seeing the Geo API in action through apps like Tweetie, Birdfeed, etc. Twitter formally turned on the functionality in November, but only through its API (not on the site itself).

Geo-location has been a hot topic these last few months with contenders including Foursquare, Gowalla (which recently took a hefty amount of funding in), Stalqer, Seesmic Web, and many more applications. Loopt and Whrrl have both pivoted their companies recently to stay relevant in the space too.

It’ll be interesting to see how companies like SimpleGeo will thrive in the space now, especially since a lot of SimpleGeo’s data is Twitter and social network-based.

source: techcrunch

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