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

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 cl开发者_C百科osest 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!

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).

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.

This is not a complete answer, because I havn't compared the given geolocation API, but there is also the Google Places API, which solves a similiar problem like the other APIs.

One thing about SimpleGeo: The Location API of SimpleGeo supports mainly US (and Canada?) based locations. The last time I checked, my home country Germany doesn't has many known locations.

Comparison between places data APIs is tough to keep up to date, with the fast past of the space, and with acquisitions like SimpleGeo and HyperPublic changing the landscape quickly.

So I'll just throw in CityGrids perspective as of February 2012. CityGrid provides 18M US places, allowing up to 10M requests per month for developers (publishers) at no charge.

You can search using a wide range of "what" and "where" (Cities, Neighborhoods, Zip Codes, Metro Areas, Addresses, Intersections) searches including latlong. We have rich data for each place including images, videos, reviews, offers, etc.

CityGrid also has a developer revenue sharing program where we'll pay you to display some places as well as large mobile and web advertising network.

You can also query Places via the CityGrid API using Factual, Foursquare and other places providers places and venue IDs. We aggregate data from several places data providers through our system.

Website: http://developer.citygridmedia.com/