Foursquare's 104M Points of Interest
published on 2024/11/24
Point of Interest (POI) datasets of any strong quality have rarely been published freely. Overture and OpenStreetMap (OSM) have been making inroads but even in 2021, I could only find half of Starbucks' locations in OSM.
Companies that produce these datasets can charge yearly rental fees that run into the 6-figure territory.
I've worked with a few of these commercial feeds. On their own, they're not great for plotting POIs on maps but they're invaluable for building geocoding systems.
This week, Foursquare announced they're making their POI dataset freely available. I was really surprised to hear this as I suspect they were earning a good amount of revenue from this dataset and there isn't a lot of competition from the freely available datasets.