Twitter Buys Mixer Labs For Geolocation Services 25
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.'"
Geolocation tools don't work anyway (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Geolocation tools don't work anyway (Score:3, Interesting)
Geolocation based on ip WHOIS data is even more unreliable tho. The WHOIS data is just what the registering entry put there, usually office or dc location or similar. For some reason maxmind geoip db and such really are more accurate, for example they see my city while WHOIS data just points to ISP's address (and this can be thousands of km's away).
There are always some weird cases of course, but generally they are much more reliable. Hell, it could even be in another country (and I've seen it); ip WHOIS data is just what organization registered the ip block.
why can't (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Complete waste of money (Score:3, Interesting)
I find it incredulous that they would throw money on the purchase of something such as this, given the fact their projected Q3 income [wikipedia.org] 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