Twitter Buys GeoAPI Team To Improve Tweet Locations
"We want to know, 'What's happening?', and more precisely, 'Where is it happening?'" Williams wrote Wednesday in a blog. "As a dramatic example, twittering 'Earthquake!' alone is not as informative as 'Earthquake!' coupled with your current location."
Several former Google employees are in Mixer Labs' workforce, including cofounders Othman Laraki and Elad Gil, the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps. The startup recently launched a new GeoAPI engine to help developers build location-based services for Twitter and other social-networking sites.
Although developers previously could annotate Mixer Labs' database of 16 million businesses and points of interest, the new GeoAPI lets them create and annotate their own areas -- intersections, neighborhoods, parks and other locations -- as both points and polygons covering specific areas around the globe.
"The purpose of a fully formed location API is to allow developers to build a robust set of location services using the API as the data source and data store," Gil wrote in his blog.
Complementing Mixer Labs' previous layers for Twitter and Flickr, GeoAPI enables developers to query the company's entities for further information from other sources, such as data from Foursquare, videos from YouTube, and weather from Weatherbug.
"You can now search for entities by name and find the neighborhoods, cities and states that contain them," Mixer Labs said. "This simple forward geocoding can help with search or other apps."
For Twitter, the acquisition is expected to let the social-networking service further enhance its already expanded location support for developers. "Our efforts in this area have just begun,"...
