Official GeoAPI Blog from Mixer Labs

Twitter and GeoAPI Team Up!

2009-12-23T09:07:00.000-08:00

We recently launched GeoAPI.com to help other developers build new and valuable location-based services. We are excited to announce today that we have been acquired by Twitter and will be integrating the GeoAPI into the Twitter API.

As Ev wrote on the Twitter blog "We will be looking at how to integrate the work Mixer Labs has done with the Twitter API in useful ways that give developers behind geo-enabled apps like Birdfeed, Seesmic Web, Foursquare, Gowalla,Twidroid, Twittelator Pro and other powerful new possibilities. We look forward to building features together that will make Twitter even more interesting and relevant to your daily life, no matter where you are."

We will continue to give new API keys for GeoAPI.com - however there may be some delays in getting keys over the holidays.

We are excited to be joining forces with Twitter and will be working out of their offices up in foggy San Francisco :)

Happy holidays from the Mixer Labs Team!

Entity Creation Now Live For All!

2009-12-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

We launched a limited trial of entity creation last week (thanks to TechCrunch for providing alpha tester API Keys).

We just wanted to let everyone know this feature is now live for all developers - you too can create places/entities/polygons for anywhere in the world using GeoAPI.com.

Get an API key here.

Follow us on Twitter here.

Users Make Their Own Entities Around the World on GeoAPI.com Demo

2009-12-11T08:12:00.000-08:00

We launched a demo demonstrating the new "entity" creation aspect of our API. This demo lets users make and name their own neighborhoods or other locations using the GeoAPI. We were surprised to see some of the cool things people added around the world.

You can play with it here or create places here.

People saying hello in London:
Places created in San Francisco:
The broader Bay Area:

GeoAPI featured on TechCrunch, GigaOm

2009-12-10T11:53:00.000-08:00

We are excited to have gotten media coverage in GigaOm and TechCrunch yesterday with the launch of our entity creation as well as addition of Foursquare, Weatherbug, and YouTube Media layers.

Liz Gannes, a seasoned technology journalist from the highly influential GigaOM writes "Pretty soon you’ll think an app (especially a mobile app) is dumb if it doesn’t know exactly where you are... GeoAPI hopes that it will be the service to make those apps smart, by translating users’ latitude and longitude into intersections, businesses and neighborhoods."

While MG Seigler, who recently wrote a thought-provoking piece about location for the industry powerhouse TechCrunch writes, "But even more interesting may be the other data GeoAPI is now allowing developers to access. Mixer Labs will begin pulling in data from Foursquare, YouTube, and Weatherbug to help provide richer data to its developers that use its services."

Make Your Own Entities!!! And FourSquare, YouTube, Weatherbug Media Layers

2009-12-09T09:00:00.000-08:00

To add to the holiday cheer, we are launching a number of new features for GeoAPI.com including:

Entity creation: This is one of our most requested features. You could previously annotate our database of 16 million businesses and points-of-interest. Now you can also create and annotate your *own* entities (both points and polygons) around the world. Do you want to annotate finch nests in the Galapagos Islands? Or create a virtual world overlay to Manhattan with your own blocks and neighborhoods? Or let students make a collaborative digital map of their campus? All this is now possible.

You can see a demo of this, where you can create your own "Twitter Empire" here.

More Media Layers: You can now query our entities (intersections, neighborhoods, parks, etc.) for:

Data from Foursquare. Sample API output.
Videos from YouTube. Sample API output.
Weather from Weatherbug. Sample API output.

This complements our previous layers for Twitter and Flickr.

Search: You can now search for entities by name and find the neighborhoods, cities and states that contain them. This simple forward geocoding can help with search or other apps.

Other: We have also made a number of less visible changes that you asked for including:

View parameters for MQL queries
Faster media layer queries
"one off" queries for set indices
SSL support
Case insensitive searching

You can read about this in our technical documentation.

Get an API key here.

Follow us on Twitter here.

Introducing GeoAPI.com From Mixer Labs

2009-11-12T14:22:00.000-08:00

V2 of the GeoAPI
We recently launched a first version of the Mixer Labs GeoAPI. The GeoAPI makes it fast and easy for developers to generate a variety of location services (e.g. everything from annotation of tweets with nearby points of interest to FourSquare/GoWalla/Brightkite style check-in apps).

Since the launch, we have gotten an enormous amount of interest from a wide spectrum of developers - everything from mobile app developers working on iPhone and Android location broadcast apps through to social media apps and even from large enterprises with geo-tagged datasets.

You told us what features you think are most important to add to our GeoAPI. We are really excited to let everyone know that we have put out a new rev of the API with some of the highest priority features including:

GeoAPI.com domain. We are re-launching and re-branding as GeoAPI.com to make it easy for developers to find and access information about the Mixer Labs GeoAPI.
Media Layers. We have added the ability to search additional media layers such as Twitter and Flickr by geo-location. For example, want to see all the Tweets restricted to the Mission District polygon? You can do it. Want to see all the Flickr photos with lat/lon coordinates bounded by Dolores park? You can do that too.
Attribute search on entities. We make it even easier to search our API for businesses or POI across multiple categories or attributes. For example, you an do a point radius search for "dive bars open past 2am within 2 miles of Houston and Mott in NYC" for your "late night in NYC" app. If you want to see only the nearby movie theaters for a movie app - it is now a simple query away.
Tiny URLs and Link Open Data for places. We have added the tiny URL domain geo.am to provide a short hand by which you can canonically refer to locations based on our GUIDs. This means a single entity will always be findable within the framework we provide.
iPhone SDK. We have added a library to make it easy for developers to use our API in your iPhone app.
Higher Queries Per Day limits. We have raised our QPD from 5,000 to 20,000. This give more room for you as a developer to grow on our service. If you need higher QPD, feel free to just email us.
Intersection Data. We have added data for over 10 million intersections in the USA. You can see a sample view of an intersection here inluding nearby Tweets and Flickr photos.

Demos
We have added two demos (each written in a few hours, which shows how much the GeoAPI simplifies geo-app development.)

Demo A: Media Layers - Tweets and Flickr Photos Organized by Neighborhood.
This demo highlights the new media layers we have added to the GeoAPI. We make it easy for you to see the Tweets, Flickr photos, and other media associated with any polygon stored in our system (e.g. neighborhood, city, parks, etc.) .

In this demo you can restrict a tweet stream by neighborhood polygons. This allows you to view e.g. all the Tweets in the Mission District, or Flickr photos from SOMA, in San Francisco.
See demos Tweets, Flickr Photos.

Demo B: What's Near Me app in Javascript for the iPhone.
In this demo (written in literally a few hours) you can access a page using your iPhone's Safari Browser. The iPhone sends us your lat/lon coordinates, and then we give you a categorized view of nearby businesses. This is similar to early iPhone location apps like iWant except instead of a client app it is written entirely in JavaScript/HTML. Similarly, someone could use the same attribute search aspect of the API to very easily write a "Nearest Parking Lot" application.

Access the demo: Go on your iPhone to:
http://geoapi.com/demos/wnm/ or http://bit.ly/31ZABT.

You can see other demos of the API here:

"Nearest POI to a Tweet" (this demo also has a mobile version if you use your iPhone http://bit.ly/46pls2)
Twitter neighborhood annotation. (this was purely done in a few lines of javascript)
Check-ins app done solely in javascript.

Sign up for the API here.

Follow us on Twitter here.

We'd love to hear more of your feedback, so please drop us a line in the comments below.