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.'"
How about attaching URLs? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Because Twitter is designed around the SMS, which puts a natural limit on the number of characters available per message (160)?
The URL to the story is 90 characters by itself, leaving only 70 for the rest of the message. You only need 20 for a typical http://bit.ly/ [bit.ly] URL.
Re: (Score:1)
So most twit's will be tagged with...basement?
Seriously (Score:1, Insightful)
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.
Iran (Score:2)
And the iranian government will be happy to track the iranian posters...
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: (Score:3, Funny)
I couldn't agree more with you. Pulling the info from ARIN is the best way to go, considering I live in Europe.
Re: (Score:1, Informative)
Right, if not ARIN, than the local equivelent, RIPE in europe's case, AFRINIC for africa, APNIC for asia, LACNIC for south america, etc.
My point is that using a 3rd party application that one generally has to pay for and provides unreliable data is silly, when one can do a simple whois on an ip and pull the information right from the source.
Re: (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 da
ASL (Score:1)
Now stalkers will have an easier time tracking their pray. Good going twits.
Re: (Score:2)
The ironing is delicious.
So (Score:1, Insightful)
Fascinating.
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.
They should do something about the spam instead (Score:3, Insightful)
That's what is going to kill them.
Where did Twitter get the money? (Score:1, Insightful)
I still don't understand the Twitter business model. Where did they get the money to buy another company?
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
Re: (Score:1)
8 Hours later. (Score:2, Insightful)
Great for Iranian Government. (Score:1)