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.

I'd assume geoapi would be reliable (bc it's twitter) but not sure of any twitter-sized sites using simplegeo. Thanks.

[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.

[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).

[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.