Twitter Acquires GeoAPI; The New GeoLocation Platform of Choice?
December 23, 2009 2 Comments
Given what we’ve witnessed since October, 2009 is sure going out with a bang. Google dumps Tele Atlas for their own mapping dataset and then gives away navigation, Microsoft adds street level imagery, Google adds oblique imagery and then gives away a spatial query server and Mapquest adds street level imagery as well. But today Twitter did something that just seems to fit perfectly with just about any mobile application. They went ahead and picked up GeoAPI.
Twitter clearly sees location as important as anything they do (I guess microblogging is something they do as well). Tagging tweets with location is something fairly new to the Twitter API, but with smartphones probably being the primary method of tweeting, location becomes natural with tweeting. We’ve been speculating that we could analyze tweets during “events” and see locations of tweets with information about what is being observed (flooding/fire/babes). Having a richer geo-api will only facilitate this further and could be the real killer crowdsourcing app.
The only pushback I’ve seen on twitter is the location API can be very accurate. I’d love to see them enable something like Fire Eagle where you can have it return a city level geocode rather than a hyperaccurate one. I mean I’m glad everyone knows how often I visit the Apple store, but I’d like @pbissett to wonder just a little.
So I’m sitting here just fantasizing what can be done with the data provided by Twitter and GeoAPI. I feel sort of like Clark Griswold…
