Census to launch API for demographic, economic app builders next month

I recently spent a bunch of time looking for a basic list of cities & populations for my latest personal project (list of sales tax rates per city: http://www.sale-tax.com) so I'm glad to hear there might be another option. I tried their fact finder website site (http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtm...) but it is really difficult to navigate and they cap the number of rows you can download at a time.

If anyone else is looking for this kind of data, the 2000 census places file at http://www.census.gov/geo/www/gazetteer/places2k.html is pretty good but has a lot of Census Designated Places (CDPs) which might not line up exactly with towns/villages. I eventually settled on using the data at http://www.geonames.org. Geonames has a bunch of data but isn't perfect - I've seen misspellings and places without population data. It's not to hard to edit the data on their site though.

Or right now, if you're impatient:

http://www.census.gov/developers/ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4076253