Twitter Buys TownMe Owner

Twitter is really serious about this local thing. It just announced acquisition of the creator of GeoAPI, Mixer Labs.

From the Twitter blog post:

The Mixer Labs crew has been working on harnessing the power of local information for a couple years and just recently launched GeoAPI, a comprehensive service for helping developers build geolocation-aware applications. As of today, they’re part of Twitter and will be working to combine the contextual relevance of location to tweets. We want to know What’s happening?, and more precisely, Where is it happening? As a dramatic example, twittering “Earthquake!” alone is not as informative as “Earthquake!” coupled with your current location.

We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities.

What’s also interesting is that as a byproduct of that acquisition Twitter now owns TownMe, a local destination site created by Mixer Labs (as their main offering).

From my earlier post about TownMe:

A mix of data crawled from the Internet and user-generated content, Elad characterized TownMe as a kind of “next generation” wiki for local. The site describes its mission as follows: “TownMe’s mission is to bring all the world’s communities and local information online” . . .

Pigeonholing TownMe is not easy. It’s not exactly a local search engine, nor is it really a directory site. Nor is it a local news and events site. It’s not American Towns or Topix, Zvents, Everyblock, Yelp or Yellowpages.com. Rather its an amalgam, in a way, of elements of all of them.

What will Twitter do with TownMe? It now owns a local destination site.

Your thoughts?