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By Cara Garretson
Twitter announced last week it has acquired Mixer Labs, developer of the GeoAPI, in an effort to add "contextual relevance of location to tweets."
Twitter has been adding pieces of location-awareness functionality to its service for a while, but the acquisition of Mixer Labs -- for an undisclosed amount -- represents a significant step forward as the company says it will integrate the GeoAPI with the Twitter API. The GeoAPI is an application programming interface that helps developers build location awareness into their applications; once integrated with the Twitter API, developers who write applications for the Twitter service will be able to easily add location-awareness to their programs, according to the social networking site.
Adding location information to tweets makes them more meaningful, says Twitter. "When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge -- everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically enhanced," wrote Twitter CEO Evan Williams on the company's blog. "Our efforts in this area have just begun."
In November, Twitter announced availability of its geotagging API, which is being used by developers of Twitter applications such as Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid and Twittelator Pro. That API lets Twitter users include geotagging in their tweets and display the location from where they posted them. However, geotagging in Twitter was disabled by default, so users would have to change their settings to enable it.
Once the GeoAPI is integrated into the Twitter API, which will add location awareness to the service itself, it will enable a number of "powerful new possibilities," said Williams. "We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are."
One such opportunity could be in driving local commerce, said Tom Taulli on Bloggingstocks.com. He noted that the GeoAPI currently holds information about 16 million businesses and locations across the country.
The GeoAPI also includes a reverse geocoder, which takes a latitude/longitude coordinate and returns the nearest intersection, surrounding neighborhood, city, state, and country; a search/forward geocoder to search for entities by name and find the neighborhoods, cities and states that contain them; and a places finder that takes point radius searches and returns information about businesses and points of interest such as hours of operations, associated key words, addresses, and phone numbers.
Other components of the API include entity creation, allowing developers to build and annotate locations around the world; a virtual layer for adding data to existing places as an overlay; and media layers for querying other media. Mixer Labs recently added a software developer's kit for implementing the GeoAPI on iPhones.
Mixer Labs was started by a handful of former Google employees.
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