Twitter buys geo-firm Twitter has bought Mixer Labs - the makers of GeoAPI - a tool kit for developers of geographically-aware applications. The over-hyped micro-blogging firm said: "When current location is added to tweets, new and valuable services emerge — everything from breaking news to finding friends or local businesses can be dramatically …
The point is that you may have a 'game changer' technology that doesn't yet make money. But by adding other companies that also don't make money, you can increase the value of your core product to a point which you may be able to monetize it.
Twitter has reached a critical mass where they have an established brand and mindshare. That in and of itself has value.
The implications of the purchase goes beyond what the reporter has written. ;-)
Surely by its very nature if you're nearby you'd already know, so the geo information doesn't actually tell you anything new. And exactly *why* would someone who has taken the time to tweet 'earthquake' when their house is falling down around their heads, forget to say where they were?
Twitter are just trying to find something to persuade people that they aren't just a fad site before they go the same way as Second Life. Before everyone leaps on me and says Sl is still around, it is. However it doesn't generate nearly as much hype as it did, Twitter is generating as much hype, and I believe it will go the same way as sl when the media finds something else to hype.
So governments can just close down their expensive geowatching departments and use twitter. Cool.
It would be much cheaper to do the same with other natural disaster watchers too, cheaper to pay some guy with a mobile phone to sit on a volcano than take all that expensive equipment up one. And some guy with a mobile phone on each beach watching for tsunamis.. I could be tempted to do that if it didn't mean having to have a twitter account.
These locating services have limited usability; were I to tweet from work, the public IP address connecting to the Internet is in a city about 500 miles (~800km) away from where I sit. A similar issue can arise if I use an accelerator from my local ISP. This could cause similar problems to the traffic reports from the wrong country which was recently reported.
netgeek
Over the years, I've looked at a few geolocation services. How successful they are depends on the ISP providing the connection.
When I was with NTL, they were able to place my connection to within a few metres (which would be good enough) of where it was. At work, it places my connection at our computer department (which is in a building on the other side of the town), so is accurate to around 0.5 mile. At home, however, with Be, I am lucky (or unlucky depending on how you look at it) if they place me within a 6 mile radius of my house. Totally pointless.
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