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Very good analysis. This gives a good picture as to where the two services currently stand. Surprisingly Facebook is doing better than I would have predicted. I

Very good analysis. This gives a good picture as to where the two services currently stand. Surprisingly Facebook is doing better than I would have predicted. I don't think you'll actually need to do too many more data dumps to see where the trend is. Doing an analysis like this in May would probably be a good indication to see how the respective services are growing. However, it would still be incomplete since the way they may be growing is through expanding to more cities instead of going "deeper" into a particular city. My guess is that the main cities you looked at are already pretty saturated, though maybe they're not, so doing the analysis next month would definitely indicate which way. If it's possible now it would be good to see how many cities in North America have at least 1 venue on FSQR/FB, and how many have 10 venues, etc. And then see how that grows over time. I think that way you could get a clearer picture of overall growth without having to make an insane amount of API requests.

alooPotato 16y ago
Yep - planning on doing it one more time in May. Not sure how I could get the number of venues in a particular city WITHOUT doing these crazy number of API requests. The API doesn't have venue counts for a particular geographic region. For example, the Foursquare API only lets you ask for a list of venues near a certain lat/long. It also limits its results to 50 per request. So there is no way to tell how many venues are in a region without splitting up the region and doing multiple requests then aggregating the results.
- OmarIsmail 16y ago
  When you say "near" can you choose the radius? Also does their API return a value such as "total results"? If the answer to both are yes then you can be quite strategic in how you make your calls and depending on the max distance could cover North America in under 10K calls which would take less than 2 hours to process. It would also make for a pretty bitchin visualization.
  - alooPotato 16y ago
    Unfortunately the answer is no and no. Foursquare returns the closest 50 venues, period. Facebook on the other hand is much better. They let you set a radius and a limit to the number of results you want. The limit can be huge, you just have to page through the results (max 500 per page). If you are interested, checkout apigee.com, they have a cool console that lets you experiment with multiple API's. What did you think of the Google Earth visualizations at the bottom of the blog post?

alooPotato 16y ago

Yep - planning on doing it one more time in May. Not sure how I could get the number of venues in a particular city WITHOUT doing these crazy number of API requests. The API doesn't have venue counts for a particular geographic region. For example, the Foursquare API only lets you ask for a list of venues near a certain lat/long. It also limits its results to 50 per request. So there is no way to tell how many venues are in a region without splitting up the region and doing multiple requests then aggregating the results.

OmarIsmail 16y ago
When you say "near" can you choose the radius? Also does their API return a value such as "total results"? If the answer to both are yes then you can be quite strategic in how you make your calls and depending on the max distance could cover North America in under 10K calls which would take less than 2 hours to process. It would also make for a pretty bitchin visualization.
- alooPotato 16y ago
  Unfortunately the answer is no and no. Foursquare returns the closest 50 venues, period. Facebook on the other hand is much better. They let you set a radius and a limit to the number of results you want. The limit can be huge, you just have to page through the results (max 500 per page). If you are interested, checkout apigee.com, they have a cool console that lets you experiment with multiple API's. What did you think of the Google Earth visualizations at the bottom of the blog post?