Citysearch wrote us to say that the API will "allow local businesses to integrate their existing Twitter presence or create a new account directly from the Citysearch business profile and tweet from their Citysearch profile page." How does this new API relate to Twitter's OAuth feature? What can a Sign-Up API do that OAuth doesn't? Also, how did Citysearch get wind of this development before a general announcement was made?

Willard continued, "There are a lot of options for the type of content you can show with Twitter integration. It's pretty much the same functionality [as OAuth, but you can also sign up."

"We've been talking to them for a while about integrating Citysearch with Twitter, and they were looking to bring on more smalll businesses. It just made sense."

So Twitter is dipping into Citysearch's trove of small, local businesses - and potential Twitter users - for the maiden voyage of its latest API. This makes sense in light of Twitter's recent integration of geolocation information with some tweets, and it also makes sense from a monetization standpoint. Companies in the small, local business space could benefit a lot from sign-up and geolocation APIs, and many of these companies are already devoting significant chunks of marketing budgets to the online and interactive advertising.

Twitter is definitely a hot commodity for small businesses that can figure out how to use it, but we're still unclear on exactly how the new API will work. Here's what the sign-up looks like on Citysearch, and what the Twitter data will bring to a business' Citysearch page:

We will bring you more news and technical details about the Sign-Up API in the morning, when we'll interview more Citysearch execs and quiz them to our heart's content.

In the mean time, the folks at Citysearch are happy to have another avenue to integrate Twitter data. "We really value having all the right content on our site to allow consumers to make an educated decision,' said Willard. "We see social media as a big part of that, whether the content is generated on our site or elsewhere. The more businesses that sign up for Twitter, the more content we'll have on our site."

We applaud Citysearch's new semantic, synaptic direction in aggregating content, and we look forward to learning all about how their new sign-ups will work tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

Revenue

MySpace stressed that it sees MySpace local as a new revenue stream, as it will share revenue with Citysearch. Neither MySpace nor Citysearch provided any details of this revenue sharing agreement however, though MySpace stressed that it sees this as an opportunity to provide advertisers with a new outlet for hyper-targeted ads.

Looking Ahead

In the near future, MySpace hopes to bring MySpace Local to its mobile apps, and the company also expects to expand it to markets outside of the U.S. soon.

Good for MySpace and Citysearch

Overall, this looks like a smart move by both MySpace and Citysearch. Citysearch, through this, gains access to a very large number of potential new users, while MySpace gains access to a large, pre-populated database of reviews. Users on Citysearch also don't tend to be as social as users on other review sites like Yelp, so this cooperation will probably bring a whole new group of reviewers to Citysearch.

Other local review sites like Yelp, for example, feature support for Facebook Connect, though Facebook itself doesn't have a 'Facebook Local' feature yet that is tightly integrated with a local review site (though some users hope they will do so soon).

Interestingly, even Citysearch itself already features support for Facebook Connect as well, which, according to Inside Facebook, is generating a constant stream of new traffic for Citysearch.

Adding this functionality seems like a natural evolution for social networking sites, and we expect that other social networks will follow in MySpace's footsteps soon.

When we say that semantic technology has a whole lot of awesome potential, this is a fun example of what we're talking about. If it can be done for restaurants, we expect similar analysis of online sentiment can be sold for all kinds of different real-world sectors.

Now restaurant owners can subscribe to receive a PDF of their monthly reports for an introductory price of $15 and a regular price of $25 per month. (Here's a sample report, in PDF format.)

Simple charts and a straightforward presentation can offer restaurant owners nervous about the Wild West of online opinion a bird's eye view of what's really going on, month by month. On the down side, the reports may enable those business owners to spot and track down negative reviewers to hassle them for the injustices they've no doubt done to a fine eatery.

Think many restaurants will go for it? That depends on how it's marketed, but we expect that today's coverage in the San Francisco Chronicle will help.

We first reviewed semantic and natural language processing review aggregation service BooRah this Spring and said we could foresee giving up Yelp for it. Then in December we called BooRah one of the Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2008.

Now this latest offering has got us really excited; its simple utility and mainstream appeal are really compelling.

We love the idea of selling aggregate reports of online activity, intelligently analyzed, to mainstream businesses effected by online activity. Sales, marketing and PR firms have paid hefty sums for these kinds of reports, often clumsily gathered and presented, for years. Aim the semantic web at the problem, give it a good price point and offer it to a very large sector of businesses and we may just see some action in the semantic technology sector after all.

Update: Our original title for this story referenced Yelp, whom we mistakenly thought were included in BooRah's aggregation of reviews. Yelp contacted us to say that they are in fact not included. We hope that will change soon - it would only make both sites more useful.