14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook's big mobile event was full of announcements and, while many were aimed at the users, developers have plenty to be excited about as well. Facebook has announced that it's expanding its Places API and now enabling third-party apps to 'check in' on Facebook as well as get access to the full Places venue database.
"In August, when we launched our Places product, we kicked off the first phase of our location platform with a few initial partners," Yariv Sadan, a Facebook software engineer with the Platmobile team, wrote.
"Today, we’re making Places check-in and search functionality available to all Facebook Platform developers as part of the Graph API. Now you can access our database of Places and let users check in on Facebook from within your application," he announced.
When it launched, the Places API only enabled developers to retrieve check-in data, with the user's permission. This had some uses, but what everyone really wanted was 'write' access.
The write API, which enabled third-party apps to register check-ins, was only accessible to a small number of partners like Foursquare and Gowalla.
Now though, any application can add check-in functionality by simply tapping into the new, fully open Places API. Basically, it allows developers to create location-based apps and services a lot easier, granted, based on the Facebook Places platform.
An even bigger announcement was the fact that developers now also get access to the full Places database, meaning that they can get a list of places nearby, relevant to the user, based on the location data they provide.
Effectively, this makes Facebook's Places API a true competitor to Google's identically named, Places API. So far, developers had relatively few options like SimpleGeo or Twitter's GeoAPI.
The Google Places API was introduced last summer. Both APIs enable developers to access a large database of venues, though Google's is likely to be more complete internationally. Facebook on the other hand is rapidly adding new venues in the US and in the countries where Places is available.
Note that the Facebook Places API doesn't allow developers to add their own venues to the database, as Facebook is probably worried about the quality of its data.