Twitter Buys Mixer Labs to Boost Location Features

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Twitter co-founder and CEO Evan Williams has just announced on the company’s blog that they have acquired Mixer Labs, creator of the GeoAPI.

Mixer Labs is primarily a service for helping developers build geolocation apps. According to the announcement, Twitter has made the Mixer Labs team part of the company and is moving them to Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco. The team will work on Twitter’s recently added geolocation features and APIs.

Mixer Labs has a variety of location-based products that are likely attractive to Twitter. They include Reverse Geodecoder (find a city or location with latitudes and longitudes), Places Finder (complex, local geo-queries), and Media Layers (players other media, like Twitter, into a geo-specific context).

A lot of the reasons for this acquisition have to do with the emergence of geolocation apps such as Foursquare and Gowalla, which have recently started to gain significant traction. Twitter likely hopes not only to build their own location app, but to integrate deeply with these services via their APIs. It’s also partly a talent acquisition, as both founders are ex-Googlers and were instrumental behind Google Mobile, Google Gears, and Google Toolbar.

Ben Parr