So Twitter has just bought Mixer Labs, the creators of GeoAPI, a location infrastructure service that provides tools and data to people building location related applications; stuff like reverse geocoding (translates lat / long to city name), neighborhood / city lookup, structured data about 16M POIs and local businesses, and more.

I see a couple of different, and non-mutually exclusive ways that Twitter could go with this:

They can beef up their paid API services

This is a no brainer.  Twitter is already charging for some aspects of its API.  GeoAPI has a working revenue model.  With GeoAPI in its stable, Twitter has more stuff they can charge for, right off the shelf.

They can beef up their free API services, expanding their footprint

Google has infiltrated much of the web via AdSense, Maps, Analytics, Friend Connect and all of its other distributed tools. Facebook is propagating like crazy via Facebook Connect.  Twitter has had a lot of success getting companies to build on its API, and can surely reach a broader universe of sites with the additional tools provided by GeoAPI.  More people building on Twitter’s API gives them access to more engineering, product, and marketing resources focused on getting more data into Twitter.

They can improve Twitter.com with more local oriented features

Location filters / nearby tweets, location based trending topics, local search – there are all sorts of ways location could be integrated into Twitter.com.

They can build another app

Wait, hear me out.  The Twitter management are product guys.  They’ve shown lots of restraint in keeping Twitter simple, and not bolting on superfluous features.  But don’t you think they have other app ideas floating around over there?  Didn’t Twitter itself start as a side project?

Twitter is now sitting on 16M local business and POI listings, not to mention a massive firehose of geo tagged tweets.  It’s not hard for me to imagine a local business page with a river of geotagged tweets rolling by, structured data like hours and payment info, neighborhood info, “who’s been here” panels with smiling Twitter avatars… come on, it has to have crossed their minds.  Maybe it looks something like TownMe.

No doubt there are other implications of Twitter snapping up GeoAPI, but I’ll cut it off there.

Today’s TechMeme headlines seem to be all about smartphones and location services.  While TechMeme doesn’t show causality, the smartphone / location services trajectory feels a lot like what we saw with broadband / web services.

Read more:

O’Reilly, TechCrunch, Twitter