I’d like to introduce you WikiPlaces app — the first and only way to access Wikimapia.org on the go!
Wikimapia is great service with the aim of adding information like title, notes, photos and comments to all interesting locations on Earth. It currently has over 10,000,000 places marked. Unfortunately its Google Maps-based interface is deadly slow in Safari on iPhone.
And here WikiPlaces comes to help you. It uses publicly available KML feed from Wikimapia to overlay its objects over standard Google map. You can find very interesting information about places near you and all over the world. Anywhere it will be either helpful or just fun to play with.
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=320536683
on Mar 19th, 2010 at 1:42 pm
Is this still available? I couldn’t find it in the US App Store…
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on May 30th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Hello Majid,
It’s been removed I guess due to it’s commercial usage, while wikimapia doesn’t allow using it’s API for commercial apps.
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Majid Alfifi reply on May 30th, 2010 11:06 am:
Thanks Mohammad. That is probably why. I was wondering if someone used their API in a free but add-supported app, will they still consider that commercial use.
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on May 30th, 2010 at 11:08 am
I guess they would
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on May 30th, 2010 at 11:12 am
No, it wasn’t removed by wikimapia. I removed it myself because it hit some wikimapia limits (number of requests, etc.) after several days. And I removed it until there’s clear documentation on their limits.
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on May 30th, 2010 at 11:18 am
Thanks pronvit for the explanation. Did you put ads on it?
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pronvit reply on May 30th, 2010 11:32 am:
Yes, it was ad-supported. We discussed possibility of both free and paid apps with wikimapia admins. Now I’m waiting for finalized documentation from them. Unfortunately it takes toooo long.
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on May 30th, 2010 at 11:37 am
Thanks pronvit.
It seems they are still not sure how to manage this. They are also still experimenting with the API. About 1 month ago, I found many of my unit tests started failing and I found they changed the structure of the XML returned.
Did you communicate with them regarding the limit? Did you consider sharing revenues with them if that’s what they are looking for?
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on Jun 8th, 2010 at 2:41 am
>It seems they are still not sure how to manage this.
Seems this is exactly what’s going on.
> Did you communicate with them regarding the limit?
They said that limits wouldn’t be very limiting, ie. generally only protection from bots.
> Did you consider sharing revenues with them if that’s what they are looking for?
Yes, they mentioned revenue sharing for paid apps.
The problem is that our last conversation was more than month and a half ago and still no news from them.
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