After the recent announcement by Twitter to get paid $25M by Google and Microsoft to enhance their search engines with useful data it seems Twitter continues to make some moves to see how they make money. They’ve been under a lot of criticism recently around not knowing how to make money.
As part of that effort they now acquired Mixer Labs (a creation of two ex-Google employees) in order to bring in location-tracking capabilities to pinpoint the locations of all of us posting messages in Twitter. Seems that big brother wants to sell our location info to others in order to foster new business models. And this is what I would like to call “applications enablement”. This opens up opportunities for developers of all kinds.
Mixer labs seemed to already have a pricing range for the # of queries you place on their “GeoAPI” (although < 20,000 are FREE), which allows you or any developer to take a “latitude/longitude” coordinate and match it to nearest intersections, neighborhoods, cities, state, and country, points of interest, etc.
So many people could now build cool applications via this and mix the Twitter crowd and their location with points of interest or interesting services. Question is: will you be OK allowing your location information being shared? As long as you opt-in it may be quite helpful. I like this move! Let’s see where it goes in 2010.
