Chirp Announcements Mean Big Opportunities for Texas Software Developers

I spent last Wednesday and Thursday at Twitter's developer conference, Chirp. Twitter announced a lot of exciting things over the course of the two-day event -- certainly not the last of which being promoted tweets, Twitter's first real attempt at a business model -- but as a developer, the announcements that interested me the most were about the new features being added to the Twitter API.
Twitter announced four big new features for its API: Places, which will resolve tweets to specific locations, like "Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA" instead of more general areas like "San Francisco, CA"; @Anywhere, a pure JavaScript API for integrating Twitter with other websites in new and very interesting ways; User streams, which will let developers watch Twitter accounts for activity (like following someone, sending a tweet, creating a list, etc.) in real-time; and Annotations, which will allow users to attach any kind of data to the tweets they send.
These features are important for Twitter because each of them allows developers to write new and useful applications based on the Twitter platform that were difficult or impossible to write before. Places, for example, will let Twitter developers create automated reviews of places of interest, like popular restaurants and museums, using a simple Twitter search and some basic analysis of the results. User streams will let businesses monitor important accounts, like @Direct2Dell and @governorperry, and integrate the activity on those accounts into their existing analytics and PR processes to react to important events with deep insight in real time.
But at InnovateTexas, @Anywhere and Annotations will be the features we'll put to work first in Innovate Texas’ upcoming website update. We'll use @Anywhere and its Hovercards feature to bring Texas companies' Twitter activity to life via the website, and to let our users tweet about what they're seeing right from innovatetexas.org. Annotations will let us label those tweets with information like the name of the company they're tweeting about and link to the company's website to give their messages new context, resulting in more effective word-of-mouth marketing for Texas companies. Using @Anywhere, we can even help Texans adopt this new communication medium more easily by letting them sign up for Twitter directly from innovatetexas.org and suggesting users for them to follow based on their activity on our site.
But while some uses of these new features are obvious, the real value will be in the non-obvious uses. Which game-changing programs and ideas will come out of these new features? With influential web companies like Austin's Gowalla already gaining traction in the market and the Social Media Business Council's impending move to Texas, our state's position as an emerging leader in social media means some of these game-changers are likely to be invented in our own backyard.
So, Texas Twitter developers, don't be shy. Get to work! What are you going to build? And how is it going to impact Texas and the world we live in?

-Andy Boothe
Twitter: @sigpwned