Skip to Content

Engadget for the iPhone: download the app now
AOL Tech

Filed under: Business, Social Software, Microblogging

Twitter acquires Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI

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.

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Featured Time Waster

Chromatic is a color-coded platformer with a twist - Time Waster

Chromatic is one of the best time-wasters I've recently come across. It's all about the gameplay -- no Flash graphics here. You play a "circle" (it doesn't really have a name in the game). You move around with the arrow keys, and you change colors with Z, X, and C. You can either be red, blue, or yellow, and you can switch at any time during the game. Each color has different capabilities -- yellow can double-jump, while red has a longer dash (which is like a forward sprint, activated by double-pressing DOWN). Each ...

View more Time Wasters


Follow us on Twitter!

Download Squad bloggers (30 days)

#BloggerPostsCmts
1Lee Mathews6819
2Jay Hathaway624
3Erez Zukerman593
4Sebastian Anthony43127
5Matthew Rogers74
6Jason Clarke61
7Chris White20
8Victor Agreda, Jr.20

More Tech Coverage

Joystiq

TUAW

DailyFinance

Autoblog

Urlesque

Engadget

WoW

Switched.com

FanHouse