Geolocation APIs: SimpleGeo vs CityGrid vs PublicEarth vs Twitter vs Foursquare vs Loopt vs Fwix. How to retrieve venue/location information?

Question

We need to display meta information (e.g, address, name) on our site for various venues like bars, restaurants, and theaters.

Ideally, users would type in the name of a venue, along with zip code, and we present the closest matches.

Which APIs have people used for similar geolocation purposes? What are the pros and cons of each?

Our basic research yielded a few options (listed in title and below). We're curious to hear how others have deployed these APIs and which ones are ultimately in use.

• Fwix API: http://developers.fwix.com/
• Zumigo

Does Facebook plan on offering a Places API eventually that could accomplish this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Facebook Places is based on Factual. You can use Factual's API which is pretty good (and still free, I think?)

http://www.factual.com/topic/local

You can also use unauthenticated Foursquare as a straight places database. The data is of uneven quality since it's crowdsourced, but I find it generally good. It's free to a certain API limit, but I think the paid tier is negotiated.

https://developer.foursquare.com/

I briefly looked at Google Places but didn't like it because of all the restrictions on how you have to display results (Google wants their ad revenue).

Answer 2

It's been a long time since this question was asked but a quick update on answers for other people.

This post, right now at least, will not go into great detail about each service but merely lists them:

• http://wiki.developer.factual.com/w/page/12298852/start
• http://developer.yp.com
• http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation
• https://developer.foursquare.com/
• http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/places/
• http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/
• https://simplegeo.com/docs/api-endpoints/simplegeo-context
• http://www.citygridmedia.com/developer/
• http://fwix.com/developer_tools
• http://localeze.com/

They each have their pros and cons (i.e. Google Places only allows 20 results per query, Foursquare and Facebook Places have semi-unreliable results) which can be explained a bit more in detail, although not entirely, in the following link. http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-pros-and-cons-of-each-Places-API

For my own project I ended up deciding to go with Factual's API since there are no restrictions on what you do with the data (one of the only ToS' that I've read in its entirety). Factual has a pretty reliable API, which as a user of the API you may update, modify, or flag rows of the data. Facebook Places bases their data on Factual's, just another fact to shed some perspective.

Hope I can be of help to any future searchers.