A Comparison of Places APIs

Location Based Services are all the rage these days. The space is still being defined and the players are trying to differentiate their service offerings in order to attract the critical mass of developers. In this post I’ll draw a side-by-side comparison of the main features provided by the major Places API providers today. While I have no hard numbers to back-up the “major provider” claim, I’ll simply go for the web companies I would look for when building an application around Location services.

Here are my candidates ordered by their first API release date:

Provider Name API Link First Released
Yahoo Yahoo GeoPlanet API Yahoo! GeoPlanetâ„¢ May 2009
Foursquare Foursquare API Foursquare APIv2 Nov. 2009
Twitter Twitter Places API Geo methods in Twitter API Jun. 2010
Facebook Facebook Places API Scattered under the Graph API Aug. 2010
Google Google Places API Google Places API Nov. 2010

The features of all these APIs are designed primarily to support (and promote) the business use cases of each respective competitor. One notable exception is Yahoo’s GeoPlanet API which advertises itself as being a general purpose API for referencing places.

I won’t try to identify any “best” API in the end. This post is meant to allow the reader to make an informed decision on which API(s) to use.

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