Yahoo GeoPlanet

» see developer.yahoo.com/geo as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

yahoo geoplanet sat in the developer-api layer i could have touched and did not. by the time woeids were the way twitter named a trending-topics location in 2010 i was a couple of years into engineering work and was not building anything that needed a geographic identifier service. the products i did build at that point used google maps for any geo lookup. for whatever reason, i never opened a yahoo developer console.

geoplanet came out of gdc, a london gazetteer company yahoo acquired in 2005. the woeid was the headline output. it was a 32-bit numeric identifier that pointed at any named place on earth, from countries down to neighborhoods or points of interest. the woeid for istanbul or for a london borough was a stable integer you could pass to the geoplanet api, the response would carry the place name along with its type and parent hierarchy. it was the kind of clean primary-key thinking that mid-2000s yahoo was very good at and that nobody else in the consumer-internet stack had built.

flickr started using woeids in august 2006 for the photo-geotagging feature. that gave woeids a public face. every flickr photo with a location tag carried a woeid in the metadata. twitter integrated woeids in 2010 for the trends/place api endpoint, where developers passed a woeid to get the trending topics for a region. the woeid quietly became a small piece of standard infrastructure for the location layer of the english social web.

yahoo released the geoplanet data publicly under creative commons attribution 3.0 in may 2009 at the where 2.0 conference. the final public data dump shipped on june 1 2012 and yahoo paused further releases pending a redesign that never came. when marissa mayer's api-consolidation effort cut through yahoo's developer programs in 2015, geoplanet was on the list. deprecation was announced in june 2015 and the api stopped responding to requests in late august 2016.

~ the dossier ~

~ what came after ~

woeids did not get a clean successor. twitter's trends api kept accepting woeids long after geoplanet itself was gone, treating them as a legacy identifier the platform maintained internally without yahoo's help. flickr continued to surface woeid metadata on existing photos. the geoplanet creative commons data dumps from 2009-2012 stayed on archive.org and became the basis for several community-maintained successor projects, including woeplanet.org, which keeps the gazetteer alive as an open dataset.

the broader shift was from yahoo's identifier-first model to openstreetmap's nominatim and google's place ids, both of which use different identifier shapes. nominatim returns osm node and way ids. google place ids are opaque strings tied to google's internal place database. neither has the clean hierarchical 32-bit integer property woeids had. that property is what made woeids easy to embed in a tweet location field or a flickr exif blob.

~ the long tail ~

the geoplanet shutdown ended yahoo's role as a meaningful provider of internet geo-infrastructure. the broader yahoo developer-api consolidation that killed geoplanet also took down yahoo placefinder and parts of boss search by 2017. by then yahoo itself was on the path to becoming a unit of verizon, the developer program effectively wound down. honestly, geoplanet was one of the last visible reminders that yahoo had ever been an infrastructure-tier internet company rather than just a portal.

the woeid identifier itself has a small afterlife in twitter's trending-location api and in the open-data community that still maintains the gazetteer, with a few legacy flickr endpoints holding on as well. it is not a dead identifier in the strict sense. it is a frozen-in-time identifier without a maintainer, which is its own kind of obituary.

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