Osm Api

Hello everyone,

I am a new member here on OSM and I reall need some guidanace regarding development with OSM.
I want to incorporate into an website an function simillar with the function of OSM when a new user registers (displaing an green mark on the map where the user lives).
If a friend of the user enters the user’s name, the site will load the map exactly where the user lives. It’s something like an user map locator.
I know it can be done in OSM because i saw it when registering but I’m wondering if there is any OSM API that does this function or please explain to me how to achieve this.

Thank you.

Well, it’s very easy to do this with mysql+openlayers to store lat/lon of users and then display the on the slippy map: see gecoding discussion: http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=1901

But it isn’t really what the Openstreetmap DB is for, if you would use the Openstreetmap API you would put nodes in the database that anyone can change. So peoples positions could be deleted just like that.