Sample “Verified” Icon

How do you know the information on local businesses provided is accurate?  We just added one more way for you and your users to know the info we’re providing is top-notch.  In our Places Detail API response, we provide a “claimed” element that lets you know if the merchant has verified their listing.

Beyond these places being flagged as “claimed”, they often also contain additional content. Local business owners can add images, a teaser, an offer, and external menu or reservation urls.  They can also customize how their name and address are displayed across the CityGrid network.  Merchants can claim their listings today on Citysearch.com, and in the future possibly from your own site or application.  The process involves phone-verification in order to minimize fraudulent claims.

Start using the “claimed” element today to show your users know the information they see is verified.

Our taxonomy is published daily in two formats: first as a list (available here) and second as a tree (available here).  Both are in json format.

Want more details? Check out our documentation on tags.

Per the CityGrid API usage requirements, publishers aren’t allowed to store CityGrid places data, and really you don’t want to–with the constant changing and volume of data, developers really want to make live API calls to get the best quality data.

However in the scenario where you want to link places in your database with CityGrid places, many publishers would like to store the CityGrid place ID in their local database–instead I recommend using the business phone number as the ID link between your local database and CityGrid.

The CityGrid Places Detail Search lets you search for business just by providing a phone number. So on every one of your places, all you need to link up with CityGrid places is the phone number. No need to store ID’s locally, the business phone number becomes the unique identifier in the system.

As data in the CityGrid network changes, including ID’s, you will always be able to link your sites or applications business listings with the rich places data available via CityGrid, with just the business phone number.

Couple days ago I talked about better round trip times with GZip, and today I’d like to talk about enhancing response times by limiting reviews and offers. Generally reviews or offers takes about 20ms each to run (but can occasionally take 50 or 100ms). Since we request reviews, offers, and content (like editorials, website link, menu link, images, etc.) in parallel, the caller only pays for the max of the 3 times with each CityGrid Places API calls. So if the times are like this:

• Content=12ms
• Reviews=20ms
• Offers=22ms

The total time used is 22ms. The place where this can be a real problem, is if reviews or offers times out. Currently the timeout on these services is 400ms (to be reduced to 100ms in the future). So if you are really wanting to improve the RTT and minimize latency you can disable reviews/offers using the following two parameters: review_count=0 and offer_count-=0. This will take the llatency and time-out of those services out of the equation.

So if you are just wanting the core places content and will not need the reviews or offers, you can significantly reduce the payload by disabling these upon request from the CityGrid Places API.

The CityGrid Places Detail Search lets you search for business just by providing a phone number.

Here is an example search for Casa Bianca Pizza in Los Angeles:

All you have to provide is the phone number minus and dashes, spaces or other special characters, the client IP address and your publisher code.

It’s a pretty quick and dirty way to do a search for a business if you don’t know the location.

Today I added a new report for each of the searches. Now for both the what / where and latitude / longitude searches, you can see a report of number of places returned and number of images, offers, reviews, and tips across all 3 APIs.

I will add other reporting features to the Interactive Places Comparison Tool in the near future, but I think I will add Factual and Foursquare to the list of APIs it compares before adding more bells and whistles.

One of the biggest bottlenecks to my development has been the number of API calls I’m allowed to make.

Here is the breakdown of API call limits per provider:

• CityGrid – No daily limit, 10M / month
• Google – 1,000 calls/day
• Yelp – 10,000 calls/day

Even though Yelp clearly allows more, they must have some other lower limit, because I keep hitting my quota just during development on the Interactive Places API comparison tool.

I’ll make one call to each provider with a search request, then I make individual detail calls for each place returned, but as of last night, this is only for CityGrid and Google–I haven’t even started pulling Yelp detail pages and every day I have to put away my development because I’ve hit their limit.

Yelp FAQ says I can ask for more, by emailing them, but it still is definitely a bottleneck for development

Both my WordPress plugins had a pretty basic look and feel, I wanted them to look better. So using the HTML and CSS template I borrowed from CityGrid I added it to both of the CityGrid WordPress Plugins to make them look sharper.

So now both the CityGrid WordPress Directory Plugin and CityGrid WordPress Search Plugin have a default UI template, as well as the ability to switch it and make it look like CityGrid.com.

Next I’m going to add another template or two, then start extending the functionality of each template, allowing WordPress site owners to have as much flexibility when deploying business search or directories using CityGrid Places API.

For example, if you want to show pizza, burgers, seafood and chinese food in your neighborhood you can launch the plugin, choose your categories, enter your city, neighborhood or zip code and it automatically adds a directory to your menu with the categories you wish to display.

The plugin has been around for a month, but it had a pretty basic look and feel, I wanted it to look better. Last week took the HTML and CSS template for CityGrid, cleaned it up and turned it into a template for any developer to use when deploying a local web directory.

I want my WordPress users to take advantage of this, so this week I added it to the CityGrid WordPress Directory Plugin. While doing this I also added a framework, allowing users to choose from multiple templates, meaning I will be adding more UI templates in the future.

I am almost done, adding the same template to the CityGrid WordPress Local Search Plugin today and committing the changes for everyone to take advantage of.

However, one common misconception I encounter talking with CityGrid publishers is the perception that monetization of your app automatically means showing advertising on your site or in your application. I think this is a common perception in an industry dominated by advertising, with many startups using this as their primary business model.

Local mobile or web advertising is one way you can make money using CityGrid, however you can get paid for just displaying places, and connecting your users with these merchants. Using CityGrid Places that Pays, developers can implement a tracker on the places details pages, passing several values, recording the fact that a particular place was displayed.

Each tracking call has what is called an “action_target”, with the most common value being “listing_profile”, which gives you credit for showing the profile of a business listing. However there a total of 12 action targets you can implement that are “billable”:

• listing_profile – Embed on the profile page of both advertisers and non advertisers
• click_to_call – Embed where user clicks to call provided phone number
• listing_website – Click to External Listing Website
• listing_review – Embed anywhere reviews are shown
• listing_map – Embed where a map is shown with advertiser’s location
• listing_driving_direction – Embed on page where directions are provided to merchant location
• listing_map_print – Embed on confirmation page of user printing map of merchant location
• send_listing_email – Embed on confirmation page of user sending merchant information via email
• send_listing_phone – Embed on confirmation page of user sending merchant information via SMS
• offer – Embed on page where advertiser offer is displayed
• partner_menu – Trigger when a non-CityGrid menu is shown
• partner_reservation – Trigger when a non-CityGrid reservation window is shown

The listing profile is most common, but you can get paid for just showing reviews, offers and a map to the business location. Then in addition you can show advertising to further increase your revenue, but advertising is not required.

There are a total of 26 actions you can record with places data, only 12 of them are billable, but you can see where CityGrid is going– rewarding developers for quality usage of places, offers and reviews data is just the start. CityGrid is working hard to understand the value of this content and actions around it, so that developers can be paid to build high quality web and mobile apps that use CityGrid content.

So if your looking to make money with your web or mobile app, definitely consider advertising, but it is a good time to start looking beyond advertising and understand how you can make money implementing “Places that Pay”!