I'm not too concerned with price. Interested in which is easier to use and whether anyone has done benchmarks to make sure they're not going to choke up.<p>I'd assume geoapi would be reliable (bc it's twitter) but not sure of any twitter-sized sites using simplegeo. Thanks.
We (SimpleGeo) have some large customers right now, however, can't really say who they are due to privacy policy.<p>I can, however, describe some of the technology that we use.<p>We've built the platform using a multi-homed, multi-master database solution we call GiselleDB. It's based on Facebook's Cassandra, but we've forked it since then. Basically we're able to handle lots of read volume, lots of write volume, as well as push the data to all of our data centers. We're currently housed in three datacenters and will expand to more later. Essentially this means we can handle plenty of volume and it's always redundant (with API failover if a datacenter goes down).<p>I'd encourage you to get ahold of me (matt [at] simplegeo [dot] com) or our developer relations guy (andrew [at] simplegeo [dot] com) if we can answer some further questions for you.
I haven't used both these apis. But from what I see, GeoAPI seems to provide writable layers if you would want to augment their data with your own data which would be available just to you, while simplegeo doesn't provide it yet. On the other hand, Sinplegeo seems to give an API that enables you to query for predicted population density in an area. Simplegeo seems to provide history for the users or objects that you are tracking while geoapi doesn't seem to provide. See which of these features matter to you and which don't. These are from what I understood by going through the docs in a few mins just for answering this question since geo is one of my interests. So, I may have overlooked something. Please verify these yourself once.
We are happy customers of GeoAPI at <a href="http://mopho.to" rel="nofollow">http://mopho.to</a><p>We didn't look too hard at SimpleGeo but I can say without hesitation that GeoAPI has been fast, stable, cost-effective and easy to use. In the rare cases where we experienced issues they were quick to respond and resolve them immediately. I also know for a fact that they are servicing some very large customers as well (larger than us for sure :).<p>GeoAPI gives you access to a pretty rich dataset for the United States off-the-shelf, which was very important for us.