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Twitter Buys Mixer Labs For Geolocation Services
itwbennett writes "In a blog entry Wednesday, a Twitter official wrote that the company has acquired Mixer Labs, maker of GeoAPI, a service that helps developers build geolocation-aware applications for Twitter. 'Software using the service will allow Twitter users to tag the location where a message was written,' Agam Shah writes in an article on ITworld. 'Twitter did not immediately respond to comment on how much it paid for Mixer Labs.'"
How about making it so users can attach a URL with a tweet so people don't have to use URL shorteners?
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Who uses Twitter anyway and why is Biz Stone some sort of genius worshipped in the social media/web 2.0 world?
Getting pwned by Iranians isn't something to be proud of.
statusnet uses openstreetview?
cool
And the iranian government will be happy to track the iranian posters...
Often, geolocation tools give faulty info, my experience working at an co-location provider tells me. We get surprising amounts of people asking why such and such geolocation gives some result, when clearing the whois ARIN swip entry points to where they want it to point.
You want to geolocate? Pull the info from ARIN directly, not some 3rd part application.
Now stalkers will have an easier time tracking their pray. Good going twits.
no
A useless company offering a useless service bought a worthless company that produces a tack-on worthless service to the first company's useless service, using investor's money since they have no revenue of their own and seemingly never will.
Fascinating.
mirrorshades radio -- darkwave, industrial, futurepop, ebm.
why can't twitter just build the same software on their own? Seems like a simple problem with a pretty straight forward feature set. Unless they are doing favors... with their investor's money.
That's what is going to kill them.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I still don't understand the Twitter business model. Where did they get the money to buy another company?
I find it incredulous that they would throw money on the purchase of something such as this, given the fact their projected Q3 income for 2009 is just $400,000 with a staff of 75+ - Either they're paying ~$6000/year salaries, or just wasting the venture capital dollars they have on things which really can't improve the bottom line or resolve major issues their users truly have with their site.
Of course, they project $4 mil in sustained incoming for Q4 2009 and up to perhaps $1.5 billion by 2013 if you believe their estimates, though I have a hard time accepting that - Especially in a down economy like this which doesn't look to recover back to it's former pace for at least another year or two. Quite frankly, this has 1999 dot-com bust written all over it, complete complete with the ridiculous hype, overpriced acquisitions and no defined strategy for how to actually make money.
All we need now is an IPO
Over eight Hours after this story is posted there is right around 20 comments. Maybe its just Christmas but I don't think anyone on Slashdot cares what Twitter does.
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Geo-locate sender. Wonderful. The Iranian government is going to love this. If it does well for them, others will quickly follow.
Keep Doing Good.