Find reviews left by a user on Google Places - google-api

I'm looking to add a feature in my web app that will determine whether a person has left a review on a specific Google Places listing. I want to verify that (1) user X left a review on the listing and (2) that the person I'm dealing with is user X.
I'm looking at the Google Places API, found here, but the most information I can find is on a simple rating.
Any leads on which API to use to find reviews left by users on Google Places?

As it turns out, there isn't a way to do this through an API, since there is so much risk of user reviews solicited by incentives. Google is one of the least picky review-collecting organizations, but they still try to deter biased reviews.
In other words, don't do this....

Related

Taking remote orders via app

I have small food store. I'm working on an app that will allow my customers to download the app, keep up with events, etc., but most importantly, order from my app menu ahead of time, take their CC payment ahead of time and I have their order waiting for them when they walk in. I want the purchase to now show up in my Square system so I can get started on the order and I would like to use Square POS to take and process the order so I don't have to keep up with two POS systems. This does not seem possible with Square? Suggestions, idea, help?
To my knowledge, that isn't currently possible with any of the available Square APIs. The best you can do is probably to set up a Square online store and allow users to make purchases from your site. Masala Wok is a good example of what this looks like.

Google Places API number of ratings

I am working on a team project. We need the number of ratings / reviews. Looking into the API I could not find the information. Questions are:
Is there any way to get these information?
How were the number of reviews calculated (how many third parties apps are involving?)
Thanks alot.
Details requests currently return an undocumented user_ratings_total property. I don't believe they provide the number of reviews.
Edit: It seems that this property is no longer returned. Thanks to Evan for noticing this.

address finder using post codes in magento1.6

After searching the web and seeing that the PAF file is not free I'm guessing there is no way to do this.. but.. does anyone know of a free system that can find a list of address with a postcode. It just seems odd to me that google can show all address wherever you click on a map. It knows the bounds of a postcode area, but there seems to be no way of listing all those address.
I need a free solution. I'm aware of postcode anywhere and that their sales people are very active within stackoverflow, but I cannot afford to pay their prices on this project.
This project only requires UK and india postcodes.
If I understand correctly, you are looking for a list/database of all mailable addresses within a certain postcode? Is that right? That will be difficult to find, at least for free. I know you don't need US data, but for reference, the US Postal Service is not allowed to give out this type of information, even for a fee, due to privacy concerns. I assume that other countries have similar policies.
I work for a US-based address verification service called SmartyStreets so I have some experience with this. There are third party services, you mentioned one, that have aggregated their own lists from various sources and can generate "saturation" mailing lists for specific postal codes. However, due to the cost involved in generating and maintaining these lists, I doubt that you will find this type of list for free.

Getting a user's photos from 3rd parties efficiently

Let's say you have an app where your user will authenticate with Picasa and Facebook in order for you to get all of the photos they have posted. To simply get all of a user's photos, both FB and Picasa require the same approach:
Get a list of albums for the user
Get a list of pictures for each album
So for any given provider with this approach, you are required to make N + 1 (N being number of albums) requests to the 3rd party. If you are doing a couple of these operations at once this seems like it would get preventably slow.
There seem to be a few alternatives to this approach:
Facebook:
Get all photos related to user
Parse these to find which were actually posted by the user
This will also give you other users' photos tagged with your user, so it may potentially end up performing worse than the original method due to sheer size of data as well as the number of request for paging involved.
Picasa:
There's a potential workaround here:
Get all photos from Picasa by person
That would probably work but seems hacky, i.e. what is a very high value that satisfies the allowable range but can still be guaranteed to be larger than the number of photos for the user.
I know this is not going to be fast no matter which route I go, but does anyone have suggestions on what I should do here? There's also always the possibility that I'm looking at it completely wrong too.
I suggest you use FQL->
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/photo/
and
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/fql/photo_tag/
It allows you to make one big query and facebook process it on their end, you can tweak it so it returns to you a list of pictures where user is tagged in for example.
I'm sorry I can't help with Picasa though, I never worked with it.

Recommended Lists Of Reserved Words For User-Generated URL Components

I am in the process of creating a web app. Since I admire the directness of Twitter's URL scheme for user pages, I'm trying to emulate them. I'd like my users' profile pages to be available at http://myapp.com/user_chosen_identifier. Right now I have some basic code for ensuring RFC3305 compliance with what I put in a URL, but I'm more worried about what words I should reserve. There was a question a year ago that almost, but not quite, addressed this problem. I'm using Routes, so it's pretty trivial to implement - but I'm not sure what to implement.
I've done a brainstorming session to think of some identifiers to prohibit (default.anything, about, admin, and so on), but that's obviously not all the work that could be done, so I'm asking the community to tell me about best practices and consensus.
What are some words that I should prohibit users from using in their identifiers if I use an http://myapp.com/user_chosen_identifier URL scheme ? Is there a list of recommendations that I can start from?
Alternatively, is this a fundamentally intractable problem like the clbuttic error and curseword filtering in general? *
Here's some words to think about:
account(s)
android
blog
contact
css
faq
form
email
error
help
home
image(s)
iphone
js
privacy
news
rss
search
secure
service(s)
support
www
video
You might also want to think about limiting the minimum character length users can create. That way you have already reserved a number of words smaller than that length. I think Facebook require usernames to be over 4 characters.

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