

Ask HN: GeoAPI or SimpleGeo? - nessence

I'm not too concerned with price. Interested in which is easier to use and whether anyone has done benchmarks to make sure they're not going to choke up.<p>I'd assume geoapi would be reliable (bc it's twitter) but not sure of any twitter-sized sites using simplegeo. Thanks.
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mattgalligan
We (SimpleGeo) have some large customers right now, however, can't really say
who they are due to privacy policy.

I can, however, describe some of the technology that we use.

We've built the platform using a multi-homed, multi-master database solution
we call GiselleDB. It's based on Facebook's Cassandra, but we've forked it
since then. Basically we're able to handle lots of read volume, lots of write
volume, as well as push the data to all of our data centers. We're currently
housed in three datacenters and will expand to more later. Essentially this
means we can handle plenty of volume and it's always redundant (with API
failover if a datacenter goes down).

I'd encourage you to get ahold of me (matt [at] simplegeo [dot] com) or our
developer relations guy (andrew [at] simplegeo [dot] com) if we can answer
some further questions for you.

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haxplorer
I haven't used both these apis. But from what I see, GeoAPI seems to provide
writable layers if you would want to augment their data with your own data
which would be available just to you, while simplegeo doesn't provide it yet.
On the other hand, Sinplegeo seems to give an API that enables you to query
for predicted population density in an area. Simplegeo seems to provide
history for the users or objects that you are tracking while geoapi doesn't
seem to provide. See which of these features matter to you and which don't.
These are from what I understood by going through the docs in a few mins just
for answering this question since geo is one of my interests. So, I may have
overlooked something. Please verify these yourself once.

~~~
mattgalligan
CEO of SimpleGeo here to clear some things up:

SimpleGeo does provide "writeable layers". This is our primary feature.
Essentially, developers can create a private layer, then start populating that
layer with points. Those points can be checkins, media, breadcrumbs, points of
interest...anything, really.

The SpotRank data (provided by Skyhook) is an additional API endpoint that
allows you to see the current population density of a given area based on cell
phone usage.

We do provide breadcrumbing, or user history if you will. This pairs nicely
with iPhone OS 4.0's new background location.

Beyond all of this, we're turning on our Marketplace shortly. We've gone out
and found lots of great geodata to expose to developers. Some developers have
also begun to contribute their own geodata to the Marketplace.

Hope this helps! (We do need some better messaging on our website for sure).

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ramar
We are happy customers of GeoAPI at <http://mopho.to>

We didn't look too hard at SimpleGeo but I can say without hesitation that
GeoAPI has been fast, stable, cost-effective and easy to use. In the rare
cases where we experienced issues they were quick to respond and resolve them
immediately. I also know for a fact that they are servicing some very large
customers as well (larger than us for sure :).

GeoAPI gives you access to a pretty rich dataset for the United States off-
the-shelf, which was very important for us.

~~~
mattg
To elaborate a bit, I did look into SimpleGeo for <http://mopho.to> but one of
our biggest needs getting started was access to existing place data which
GeoAPI has available right now. I've been keeping an eye on SimpleGeo for news
about their upcoming market place where you can purchase data sets, but it's
been a few months and it's still unclear when it will be available. I haven't
done any comparative benchmarking yet since GeoAPI met our needs and SimpleGeo
wasn't ready yet.

~~~
yanda
I wanted to elaborate on Matt & Rama's points and go a bit further:

GeoAPI

\+ Got us an API key within 5 minutes of requesting it

\+ Comes with a comprehensive list of points of interest, from place data
(restaurants, bars, ...) to other (parks, cities, etc...) for the US. This was
the single most important factor as it enabled us to build a place-aware
application without worrying about places too much

\+ Has an API that scales and easily handled our bump in traffic due to being
TechCrunched

\+ Has extremely supportive and fast technical support and issue resolution.
The engineers, despite being at Twitter, still react in "startup-time" which
is critical to our success

SimpleGeo

\- Took 2 months to get us an API key

\- Still has no POI data. This is apparently coming in their marketplace but
will cost an extra fee and there's no way to test the quality of the data to-
date

Basically, it was no contest. I have no doubts that the SimpleGeo guys have
built a great way to index & search for data spacially, but without a
comprehensive POI database, the effort required to build a geo app is much
greater. With GeoAPI, we not only got fast geospatial search but also a well
organized list of POI to go with it.

Hope this helps.

