Twitter said late Wednesday that it had acquired Mixer Labs, a company specializing in geotagging services for applications. It appears that the company would use Mixer’s technologies to improve its own geotagging functionality that it just launched for developers in mid November, and something that many mobile Twitter clients had been doing long before the company jumped on the bandwagon.

Mixer’s GeoAPI is used in non-Twitter applications, and it appears that it will continue to be even under new management. “We will continue to give new API keys for GeoAPI.com,” Mixer Labs said in a blog post announcing the acquisition. Twitter founder Ev Williams also seemed to suggest that the company was looking to merge the two company’s efforts while maintaining Mixer’s already established customer base.

Geotagging is a nifty feature for the mobile tweeter, although Twitter’s current setup doesn’t really make it too useful. The only way a location can be given in a tweet is through the tweet itself. It would be nice if Twitter embedded this information into the message itself just like it does the client information (i.e. “posted 1 minute ago from web, etc.), and maybe that’s an initial first step with this.

 
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