Twitter Buys Geolocation Startup Mixer Labs

In an attempt to make its platform more ‘location aware’, the micro-blogging giant Twitter has acquired Mixer Labs, whose GeoAPI tool will pinpoint the location of people posting messages or ‘tweets’ on the website. 

Mixer Labs was founded by two former Google employees, Elad Gil and Othman Laraki with a mission to provide location as a service. The GeoAPI includes a Reverse Geocoder, 16 million business listings and points of interest and a writable layer which allows developers to add their own annotation of places and entities and do complex geo-queries against this data. 

The announcement was made by Twitter CEO Evan Williams on the company blog which said that “Twitter and Mixer Labs will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know what’s happening? and more precisely, Where is it happening?” 

Twitter, which allows its members to post 140 characters long messages, will be working closely with the Mixer Labs team to integrate GeoAPI with the Twitter API and will look to give the developers of Birdfeed, Gowalla, Twidroid, and Twittelator Pro ‘powerful’ tools that will make Twitter more interesting and relevant in our daily lives.