Someone tweets on Twitter – “Earthquake”. What sense does it make to you? May be it was retweeted to you after 15 levels of RTs. This tiny bit of information leaves you asking the ultimate question – WHERE? If you know the tweet was made from Afghanistan then you know where the Quake occurred, or most probably did.
Twitter has been trying to address this issue for a while now. Recently they acquired Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI. Mixer Labs has been around for some time and recently made news with their GeoAPI service. It has been of great help to developers developing application around geo location specific data and responses. With support from Mixer Labs manpower Twitter hopes to make its tweet API streams still more informative. They had announced initiatives in this direction in August. Acquisition of GeoApi only proves how seriously they are taking this project.
This service from Twitter will directly influence other third party apps built around Tweet streams and geo location data. So Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro will the beneficiaries. Yeah we too.
Geo API (src - geoapi.com)
