mackstann

Your Places API is extremely restrictive and prevents me from building a database of local places to make an awesome website with. Foursquare's Venues API is much more open, and allows me to store/cache their data to implement my project.

Do you recognize that the restrictions on your Places API dramatically limit its usefulness, and do you have any plans to change this?

The TOS says:

(b) No Pre-Fetching, Caching, or Storage of Content. You must not pre-fetch, cache, or store any Content, except that you may store: (i) limited amounts of Content for the purpose of improving the performance of your Maps API Implementation if you do so temporarily, securely, and in a manner that does not permit use of the Content outside of the Service; and (ii) any content identifier or key that the Maps APIs Documentation specifically permits you to store. For example, you must not use the Content to create an independent database of “places.”

This is vague -- what does "limited amounts" mean? What does "temporarily" mean? It's also unclear whether my project would be considered "an independent database of places".

I would essentially be building a permanent database of places that is regularly updated -- so is this a cache that's solely for performance reasons or not? It's all very unclear and I prefer to not get myself in legal trouble.

Foursquare very clearly allows you to permanently store data as long as you refresh it at least every 30 days (there are other terms of course but that's the gist of it).

I'm making an app which basically showcases what you can get to on a specific transit line. So you pick a bus line, and it loads the coordinates of every stop on that line, and finds stuff near every one of those stops. I can't imagine a way to do this quickly without storing all of the places in my own database. If there are 80 stops on a route, it'd be ridiculous to query Google 80 times just for one person to view a page. Also, having it all in a database allows me to do the proximity searches ahead of time so that I can just quickly pull the results out of an index when the user requests it.

Thanks; that video was helpful. Another thing that's great about Foursquare is that I can use any maps implementation I want. It's just a much more free and open approach in several ways, and it would be awesome if Google could match that. Thanks for putting up with my questions. :-)