Location, location, location. With the growing ubiquity of GPS-equipped phones, there is a virtual land rush going on right now to put geolocation capabilities in every mobile app. Today, Mixer Labs, the folks behind TownMe, introduced the GeoAPI, aimed at developers who want to add geolocation features to their apps in a plug-and-play fashion.
The GeoAPI is built on top of what was previously called the TownMe GeoAPI, which offered a reverse geo-coder for lat/long coordinates and geo-database of 16 million businesses and points of interest. But now it is its own separate product, and with today’s release the GeoAPI now includes geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos, improved search, a dedicated short URL (http//:geo.am) for location-specific links, an iPhone SDK, and better intersection data. You can find out more details here.
So a developer who wants to build their own Foursquare/Gowalla-type mobile app with check-ins and geo-Tweets can build it on top of the GeoAPI instead of assembling all the underlying data from scratch. Developers get up to 20,000 queries per day for free. They can also store their own data in the GeoAPI servers and run geo-queries against them.
To get a basic feeling for how this works, check out these simple demos for geo-coded Tweets and Flickr photos in San Francisco. You click on a neighborhood and it shows recent Tweets or photos taken from there.
Mixer Labs co-founder Elad Gil was the first product manager for Google Mobile Maps. He will find competition for creating a geolocation infrastructure for developers from SimpleGeo, founded by Matt Galligan (previously of Socialthing) and Joe Stump (ex-lead architect of Digg). Both Gil and Galligan will speak on the Geo Streams panel at next week’s Realtime CrunchUp, along with geo experts from Twitter, Foursquare, Google, and Hot Potato. (Tickets are still available). I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot about which geo API is going to be better.
Wow, they even created their own protocol!
http//:
I think that’s a bit confusing and people will get it mixed up with good ‘ol http, but awesome for them!
ha – yeah i think that is a typo in the article
Location engines will replace search engines.
??? Not likely. More likely, search engines will continue to incorporate location information.
there is no information on their site, about price after the free 20k queries. Sort of a big detail to leave out. Especially to base your underlying technology on without all the details
also on their documentation it says 5k queries a day “Be nice. Don’t hammer our servers unnecessarily. If your app is taking off like a rocketship, please let us know and we can work something out. By default, each API Key is limited to 5,000 queries per day. If you come within striking distance of that, please email us at “api at geoapi.com”.”
Thanks for pointing this out – this is actually old documentation from when we first alpha launched the service. I just fixed it.
a) We have raised QPDs for all keys to 20,000 queries.
b) We are happy to increase the QPDs for developers who contact us and legitimately need the increase.
c) We are indeed reserving the right to charge for very high volume usage. We need to pay for our servers and data costs and if people are using our service really heavily we should not be actively losing lots of money to power their efforts. That said, we do not expect to charge for anything that is a reasonable query volume.
PS here is the new language:
If your app is taking off like a rocketship, please let us know and we are happy to adjust the query per day thresholds. By default, each API Key is limited to 20,000 queries per day. If you come within striking distance of that, email us at “api at geoapi.com” and we can up your QPDs.
Wow!
They’ve invented wheel once again …
Cool Features…. Google May be partners
Pretty freakin cool.
Cheers,
mytweetmark.com
This is going to rock!
Location awareness is going to revolutionize contextual advertising. In order to reach its peak, however, consumers must be able to customize every aspect of the targeted advertising experience. Consumers must have the ability to limit what people and which companies “see” them.
I don’t get why it’s better than using built-in iPhone OS 3.0 geo-reverse feature and twitter geo search API?