New Mashup Turns Google Maps Into Location-Based Blogging Tool
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A map-loving web programmer has turned one of Google Maps' standard features into a simple publishing tool. With a little help from Yahoo Pipes, Tony Hirst's My Maps mashup can generate blog posts with location data attached. Readers of your blog will not know what happened and when, nor where.
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Determining geographic locations based on Internet IP offers localization services and brings together user communities without the need for GPS receivers or complicated configuration switching.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has improved Google Maps with immersive views of streets from a handful of U.S. cities as well as with miniapplications that can be embedded on a map. The Street View feature places users at the road level, giving them the perspective of drivers and pedestrians and thus offering a deeper and more detailed experience of the location than aerial images provide. So far, Microsoft has been at the forefront of immersive online maps imagery, introducing so-called bird's-eye views in late 2005 that allowed users to tilt aerial images and view them from an angle. In November of last year, Microsoft unveiled 3D views of 15 U.S. cities, a feature that lets users zoom in and out of these urban areas and get a three-dimensional view of buildings, terrain, and the like. On Tuesday,Â Microsoft increased the number of cities availableÂ in 3D in its Live Search mapping site. Google debuted Street View on Tuesday with major roads in San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and Denver and promises to add more cities "in the near future." Meanwhile, Google also announced it is now possible to build lightweight applications so that users can mash them up with Google Maps. Called Mapplets, these gadget applications will be available in the Maps site for users to choose from and apply to their maps. Currently in preview mode, Mapplets can be found in a special version of Google Maps for users who want to try them out. Mapplets take the concept of Google Maps mashups one step further, Google said. Previously, developers could build an application on top of Maps and make it available on a specific Web site. Now, those mashups can be packaged as a Mapplet so that several can be combined on a single Maps Web site. Developers can find more information about creating these mapplets in this documentation page. To allow for the creation of Mapplets, Google merged two of its existing application programming interfaces: the Gadgets API and the Maps API.
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Location-based services appeared here, there, and everywhere at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, as service providers maneuvered to take advantage of the increasing number of mobile phones shipping with integrated GPS (Global Positioning System) modules. Many of the services put the emphasis on finding your friends, not finding your way, as GPS evolves into more of a social tool.Yahoo announced a service called oneConnect&#160;that will to alert you when contacts arrive in town, warn you what mood they are in and show you a list of their recent e-mail messages that you have left unanswered. Yahoo intends to collect this information by combining status updates from sites like MySpace with GPS data from mobile phones and other information from Web mail and instant messaging services, a kind of aggregation for social networks. The service will go live by June, and will work with services including Google&#39;s Gmail and GoogleTalk, AOL Instant Messenger, and Microsoft&#39;s Outlook Web mail, said Marco Boerries, executive vice president of Yahoo&#39;s Connected Life division.Communology, of Cologne, Germany, promoted a similar notion of social-network aggregation. Its&#160;Mobile Mash-Up&#160;can help sites like Facebook or Xing offer mobile users the ability to locate friends or tag photos with information about where they were taken. Communology sells &quot;white label&quot; services, using its Live Media software platform to build social-networking services for other brands.Linking up with Facebook is a strategy that also occurred to Wayfinder: it now offers a GPS widget for Facebook users called LocateMate. The company also introduced a forum for users of its software to share favorite routes and locations at&#160;MyWayfinder.com, with links to digital mapping tools such as Google Earth and Microsoft Virtual Earth.GyPSii showed a BlackBerry client for its mobile social-networking service. It already offers versions for handsets running Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. The service allows users to share photos, videos and other information, tagging it with location data. Last year, GyPSii, based in Amsterdam, acquired Finnish mobile phone manufacturer Benefon, one of the first to build GPS modules into mobile phones.One of the strangest location-based mobile social networks revealed at the show allows users to share information about ... public toilets. MizPee.eu offers reviews of toilets in Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome posted by community members, with ratings for cleanliness and cost. Showgoers hoping to use the site to beat the long lines for toilets on site were disappointed, though: the nearest one listed is 1.45 kilometers from the showground.
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Google users can now build custom map mashups from other people's mashups. The company rolls up two of its user-generated mapping products -- MyMaps and Mapplets -- to enable folks to create custom maps using dynamic data.
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Google Maps can be a bit of a shutterbug these days.
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An airfare predictor and subway guide, restaurant reviews and car sharing
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A new feature from Mapquest will allow Web users to send color maps and driving directions to their phones.
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As a companion to the podcast version of his review, Matthew Turland has posted his comments in text form over on his blog today.   I received an e-mail recently from a very nice gentleman at Packt Publishing - their representative asked if I would be willing to review one of their books, namely PHP Web 2.0 Mashup Projects by Shu-Wai Chow. Reviewing books is not something I had done before, so I thought I would give it a good old-fashioned college try.   He mentions the size of the book (and how it's not an indication of the quality) and the basic structure of the book, including spotlights on some of the specific topics covered.
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Yahoo Maps gets a great new upgrade that helps users re-route their driving directions.
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Blog: Hackers offer their take on Google's Street View feature.
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Google Maps has updated some of the street maps or hybrid views of major US cities with Metro and Subway stations and pencil outlines of buildings.  This my be a sign of Google Transit expansion, but even if not, it&#8217;s a great new addition to Google Maps. [Hattip : Google Operating System] Advertisement:  Text Link Brokers Sell [...]
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New ground-based city views wow the crowd Google yesterday announced the immediate availability of "Street View" - ground-level, photographic panoramas of Denver, Las Vegas, Miami and New York which allow Google Maps surfers to "navigate around a city, 'virtually' walking the streets, checking out restaurants and landmarks and even zoom in on bus stops or street signs to make travel plans":â¦
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Google's Maps application is making headway against the number-one ranked map Web site.
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Google's new mapping tool catches urban ephemera in the act, from tabbies in windows to red-light runners. Submit and vote on your favorite scenes captured by Google -- be they citizens flouting laws or hot dog vendors doing their thing.
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Topix.net cooks up a geolocating algorithm that rounds up regionally relevant write-ups. In Epicenter.
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Yeah, but what's that in cubic furlongs? Those among you who recently adopted the new Vulture Central standards of volume, length, area and, critically, the speed of sheep in a vacuum, might be interested to learn that Google Maps has decided to offer a few alternatives of its own.â¦