Map Scripting

In addition to the W3C geolocation standard (I covered iPhone geolocation previously) and finding your user’s location based on IP, there are a number of services that let users actively share their whereabouts. Most of these services also have APIs, which allow you to access the shared locations (with the users permission, of course).

Here is a selection of location APIs and in some cases, tutorials that help you get started:

• FourSquare allows read and write actions. Check out the documentation and this PHP tutorial
• Google Latitude is in Beta and also allows read and write. See Google’s documentation.
• Gowalla only has a read API. See its documentation.
• BrightKite has a fully-featured read/write API. There’s a Python library and documentation.
• Finally, there’s FireEagle, Yahoo’s location broker service. I cover this one in the book, but you can also see my WebMonkey tutorial and the FireEagle documentation.

Which are your favorites? Am I missing any?