GeoAPI will integrate directly into the Twitter API, which plays into Twitter’s plans, reported in mid-2009, to integrate geo-based location into its service. (…) It’s a big deal because most business data from online listings come from limited resources, he says. This acquisition creates an “open Yellow Pages,” he tells me, explaining it lets startups create an application that gives them instant access to business data. The distributed nature of Twitter starts to apply to the structured world of online Yellow Pages. (…)
Shotland tells me the integration will create a dramatic shift in the way people search for local information. Twitter could become the clearinghouse for business data simply by having the ability to process, update and distribute the information in a way that anyone can use it. If that happens, you suddenly have an explosion of relevant, local information that any business can take and integrate on a Web site. And if that data matches up with tweets, it makes it all the better. (…) If Twitter became the source of “truth” for business records, it would become “hugely disruptive to the local search industry,” Shotland says. The emergence of an open source yellow pages for local business is one of the 11 predictions on his blog for 2010.
Right here, right now, there is no other place I’d rather be (to quote that song)
A Frog in the Valley 