iPhone: get nearby places / places list

I've been wondering, what list开发者_StackOverflow社区 does facebook places use? Is it foursquare's one?

And if so, how does it work? Can I connect to foursquare's API and get nearby places with coordinates or something like that?

Thanks a lot!

Here is simple way to find out places near by given LAT and LONG as well as with specific word like-- Hotel,Bar etc: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&sll=LATANDLONG&radius=500&q=SEARCHWORD&output=kml It returns KML file ,and user can parse just like XML parsing.

Here's a link to FourSquare's documentation. Scroll down and look for "Venue methods." You supply the API the users longitude and latitude and Foursquare will return a list of nearby places.

http://groups.google.com/group/foursquare-api/web/api-documentation?pli=1

Also, here's a link to some sample code on how to implement the Foursquare API into your iOS app. https://github.com/anka/bw_examples/tree/master/FoursquareIntegration

I believe facebook and the like foursquare built up their places mostly by user input. In other words they might have started by buying a commercial dataset in a particular location. That's the seed data. Thereafter, users can add more places as they go. This way their database grew and now they have their own proprietary data about places.

If you go to either apps, you can search for a place, and if not found you get the option to add that place with address, category etc.

I am curious to know if Facebook uses any third party API for its Places feature.

For how it works, you can use Facebook Graph API which provides search.