Geolocation is a hot topic. Google just got the patent on geolocated advertising, mobile phones allow us to pinpoint ourselves on the planet and find things nearby and with augmented reality applications we can even find our way by filming our surrounding and finding hidden treasures by moving our mobile around. Using geolocation as a developer is quite easy, you can do a few things:
If you are building something in a social network, you can get the geographical location from the user’s profile.
If you work on a certain mobile platform (Android, WebOS, iPhone) you get APIs to detect the current location.
If that is not an option you can use the W3C geo location API in browsers that support it.
If everything else fails you can guess the visitor’s location from their IP number.
That is the where, but how to know what is around me?
Knowing the location is one thing, but what if you want to know more about the area? What about the geographical hierarchy? What part of the city/country are you in and which other geographical and administrative areas are nearby?
All of this has been available for you for quite a while. The GeoPlanet API and dataset released by Yahoo! has been out for a while but did not quite get the love from the mainstream developer crowd it deserves. The geo hackers, on the other hand already love it to bits and helped make it more accurate by providing feedback.
To make it a bit easier for you to understand what the GeoPlanet API allows you to do, I’ve put together the GeoPlanet Explorer – a tool that lets you explore all the GeoPlanet data in an interactive way:
Our friends Jim and Nick at Doctype recently attended Future of Web Apps Miami along with their camera gear. They kindly put together a highlight reel of the day including interviews and clips from the main stage sessions. They will be releasing full length interviews over on their Facebook page shortly.
Just as a quick heads up the full length videos from the event will be made available shortly here on Think Vitamin.
One of the things that’s great about the Internet is that it’s open to everyone. There are a million sites, all different, and everyone is free to invent their own way of doing things. Of course, that has left us with a legacy of systems which don’t always work well together.
When you are using a web browser things mostly work because everyone adheres more or less to web standards, or at least the bits major browsers support. When you want to get data from the web to use in your app things aren’t quite as simple. Enter YQL (Yahoo Query Language).
Almost every developer knows about using SQL for getting data from databases. We wanted to do that for the Internet. YQL allows you to access all kinds of information from the internet in a very similar way to the way you would get data using SQL.
A YQL Query
A basic query in YQL is really easy:
select * from search.web where query = "javascript";
The thing we want to do is select all data (*) from Yahoo! search for web pages where the query is the term “javascript”. If you already know SQL it’s obvious, if you don’t it’s still pretty easy to read. In this case what’s happening under the hood is YQL is mapping the request to the search.web table to a pattern to call the Yahoo! BOSS (search) web service. So we are actually making a request, on your behalf, to the url:
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