Digital Media Buzz > Twitter & GeoAPI’s Great Land Rush Of 2010

Twitter & GeoAPI’s Great Land Rush Of 2010

By Ron Callari

Some call it the Great Land Rush of 2010. Others don’t quite understand what all the fuss is about. And others yet still feel that “location-based services” are an intrusion on our privacy. Whatever your perspective at this moment in time, I can almost guarantee you that you will be feeling entirely different about geolocation apps by year’s end.

And the leader-in-charge here is not any of the location-based social networks like Foursquare that have caught the early buzz (even though I and others have called it ‘the next Twitter‘). No … the player that is going to mix it up on a grand scale is Twitter itself.

Back on Christmas Day, in a blog titled, “Twitter’s 50,000+ Will be “Location” Game Changer in 2010,” I predicted that Twitter’s acquisition of Mixer Labs and GeoAPI would be a game changer in 2010, due to the number of third-party app developers that potentially have access to this platform. This small army of techies at last count numbered 50,000+. While I don’t suspect that all of them are fully equipped in tackling geolocation app development, I am sure any developer with the smallest amount of location-based knowledge is going to want to take a stab at creating a GeoAPI app for Twitter.

The rationale supporting my assertion is based on a number of factors that have surfaced through leaks and speculative activity over the course of the last 45 days. However when all these pieces are viewed collectively, it becomes clear that Twitter’s ‘westward ho’ wagons are out front leading the charge to absorb the greatest ‘land-mass’ in the location-based space this year.

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