Targetting tweets
Anyone who has tried to search Twitter will already be aware of the difficulty of finding something useful among the deluge of stream-of-consciousness prattle. Twitter is hoping to help overcome that problem by introducing geolocation to tweets.
This is the primary reason behind its acquisition of Mixer Labs, creators of a service designed to help developers build geolocation-aware applications. With social media activity increasingly taking place on mobile devices, automatically tagging a tweet with the location at which it was sent is something Twitter thinks users will find useful.
Here's some of what Twitter chief exec Evan Williams had to say about it in a blog: "We want to know What's happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering "Earthquake!" alone is not as informative as "Earthquake!" coupled with your current location.
"We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and others powerful new possibilities."
Mixer labs and its staff will be incorporated into Twitter, but the terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
