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Comment by taylorbuley | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see some technical leadership from Yelp. A tight partnership with 3rd party developers may be a nice way to go up against Google My Business and Bing Places.

If anyone from Yelp engineering is reading this, I'd love to see a major player get behind some standard for uniquely identifying places on which we could join public and private place-based datasets. I like mapcodes: http://www.mapcode.com/

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Mapcode doesn't identify a place/business/venue, it identifies a location on earth. If the building moves or a business changes offices then the Mapcode changes, too.

Take a look at Mapzen's gazetteer project "Whose on First". It aims to generate a unique identifier (and store with it concordances for other venue IDs, opening hours, images, etc.) for every venue on earth and is designed to handle situations where a business is started, changes location, or closes.

https://whosonfirst.mapzen.com/

(Disclaimer: I work for Mapzen)

Very cool! Business (vs. what I call place) is interesting, indeed. I'm working in local media with 150+ year content archives so for this ask I'm more interested in telling the story about a location on earth then the business that currently occupies it. Businesses come and go (or move around) but looking at a single place on earth can be quite the storytelling opportunity too!

Their api doesn't support querying for more than 3 reviews, have ids on reviews, or for any business to authorize your app to enable inline replies. All of which can be done is Google My Business and Facebook apis so I don't think this is anything more than catchup.

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