Google has launched a new feature on Google Maps this morning. The My Maps tab allows you to mark your favourite places on a map, draw lines and shapes to highlight areas, add text photos and videos, publish your map to the web and share your map with others.
There are mashup sites out there that allow you to create maps using Google maps but this is far easier to use and really slick. It's a natural progression for Google to move from just providing the maps API to developers to now allow anyone with even the smallest amount of technical knowledge to create their own map mashup.
The great thing about making it so open and inclusive is that we should see all sorts of useful map ideas being produced by people around the world. It should generate some really useful maps for travellers and anyone who is interested in a particular location.
Smart move by Google, I'd like to see them creating a pipes type app next which would allow us to add our Gmail address books to a map...
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Now create your own map mashup with Google Maps
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Twitter crazy
Here's a list of ten Twitter spin-off's and mash-ups kindly published here by The Register.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Berners-Lee urges preparation for Semantic Web
Great article in Computer Weekly that describes the benefits of semantic web and why companies need to start preparing. Tim Berners-Lee mentions the Resource Description Framework and Web Ontology Language that's coming from the working group. This is something I'm looking forwards to (as an information junkie), it's similar although much more complex to Microformats which is pleasing (as an avid fan of Microformats) and will really help make the information available through the web more useful and accessible (Google really should have thought of this...)!
The more we get overloaded with information and the more disjointed the web becomes it's imperative that we (as designers/developers/experts) all embrace semantic web and ensure it becomes the defacto standard for tagging up content as soon as it's released (of course your Microformats will work alongside). Content that can be understood (to some extent) by software opens up a myriad of possibilities for us all, especially with the growing trend for data mashups...
Saturday, March 03, 2007
Guide to mashup services
Techcrunch has a great article describing some really good services offering users the ability to mash up data and web services to come up with something new. Well worth a read!
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Social networking mashups to come
Seeing as some of the biggest social networks are now opening up API's which will allow developers to really add value to their sites by doing the leg work for them and mashing other sources of data together with them. Both Facebook and Friendster have announced plans to open up access to their API's. It's a smart move as this will bring added value for their users, encourage new users to sign up and therefore increase revenues for them. MySpace, Google (with Orkut) and professional networks such as Linkedin are expected to quickly follow suit.
This could produce some very cool apps indeed! I'd like to see something that mashes the user data up from all of them and attempts to pair a MySpace profile with it's Linkedin profile, could be very telling (and quite humorous results would ensue no doubt).
It will also make creating widgets for MySpace etc a much more open process and the widgets could get really useful.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Mash-ups everywhere in travel
Travelistic launched yesterday as the latest site to mash up various sources into a travel related community site. They purport to be a site that 'lets you explore the world through video. We host all kinds of travel videos, including user uploads, professional content, and tourist board videos.'
Described by it's creator as "YouTube meets the Travel Channel meets YouTube" it certainly looks like it will become that (once it gets enough content uploaded, at the moment some destinations are a bit sparse).
They've also mashed Google Maps into the mix so you can look at the location that viedos relate to.
Socially you can rate the video producers and tag content. It's looking really promising though, I can think of a loads of other services with open API's that could be mashed into Travelistic, I'm sure we'll see this happen as the service develops.
