ReadWriteWeb

The International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), a non profit research organization in Berkeley, California, is due to present new findings next month regarding "cybercasing," a word researchers coined to refer to how geotagged text, photos and videos (those that include location information) can be used by criminals and other dangerous parties to mount real-world attacks.

Using sites like Craigslist, Twitter and YouTube, the researchers were able to cross-reference information contained within publicly available online content to determine the exact home addresses of potential victims, even those who had posted the content anonymously. The experiments didn't take weeks, days or even hours of research either - the addresses were pinpointed with GPS-level accuracy within minutes.

Nokia acquired location-based services company MetaCarta on Friday, a service with two distinct focuses: geosearch and geotagging. With MetaCarta's geosearch technology, the service finds content, data and information about a place and then presents it in a single mapped-based view using any map server, whether one from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, ESRI or another company. The geotagging technology, on the other hand, lets MetaCarta pull geographic references from online content and then allow that information to be used in other applications.

WordPress' iPhone app (iTunes link) just got a nice update and now allows you to geotag your mobile blog posts. WordPress launched official support for geotagging posts through the web interface on Wordpress.com blogs last November, though bloggers with self-hosted WordPress installations have long been able to geotag their posts with the help of numerous plugins.

While the iPhone app supports both Wordpress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs, users with self-hosted blogs won't see any advantage in geotagging their blogs until WordPress releases its own geotagging plugin in a few weeks.

While Twitter's growth has slowed down in recent months, new data shows that the popular microblogging service has found a lot of new users outside of the United States. According to new data from social media analytics and monitoring firm Sysomos, the U.S. now accounts for about 50% of all active Twitter users. This is down sharply from 62% in June 2009. The share of Twitter users from Brazil, Indonesia and Germany, however, has grown significantly over the last six months.

Twitter just announced that it has acquired Mixer Labs, the company behind GeoAPI.com. GeoAPI is a service that allows developers to easily add geolocation data to their apps. Twitter just launched its own geotagging API a few weeks ago. Even though a number of mobile and desktop Twitter apps like Seesmic Web and Birdfeed support Twitter's geotagging API, only a very small number of users are currently making use of this feature.

In a recent post on Twitter's new geolocation feature and the kinds of apps it would allow developers to create, we received a comment from Bob Hitching telling us to check out GeoMeme.

GeoMeme is Hitching's side project, a real-time web app and also a location-aware mobile web app for iPhone and Android phones. It allows users to see and compare trends in specific locations; for example, you could see the most tweeted-about musicians performing at an award show or the most-tweeted political buzzwords in a given state or town.

Earlier this spring, Twitter announced it would soon be adding location-based information to tweets.

Typical of what we like to think of as the company's "mysterious charm," the feature has been unveiled six months later with a brief post on the Twitter blog. The new geotagging capabilities can already be seen in certain third-party apps and might even come to the web interface sometime soon.

Pixelpipe, an increasingly popular service that allows its users to easily post text-based status updates and media files to multiple social media sites, just released a large update of its mobile clients. Thanks to this, users can now attach geolocation information to status updates they send from Pixelpipe to over 30 services. Today, Pixelpipe will release this feature in new versions of its Android apps and then integrate this feature in the next iteration of its Nokia and iPhone apps as well. Now, when you send an update from Pixelpipe, you simply enable the "Geo On" button and Pixelpipe will include a link to a custom pi.pe page with a map that shows your location.

Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing site, just released a nice update of its mobile site. If you have an Android phone or an iPhone (updated to the 3.0 firmware), you can now see images that were taken close to your current location. The new mobile site makes good use of some of the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 update. Specifically, it looks like Flickr's mobile site now hooks into Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Typically, developers could only access this from their own, native apps, but now, web apps are also able to access location data.

At the 140 Twitter Conference yesterday, Alex Payne, Twitter's API lead told Robert Scoble that Twitter might soon add location-based information to every tweet. Currently, users can set a location on their profile, but individual tweets are not geo-coded in any way. If Twitter did indeed add a geo-references to every tweet, then that would open up the door to a wealth of new possibilities for developers. Suddenly, for example, it would be possible to develop an application that could pull in every tweet ever made from a certain restaurant or bar.