August 17th, 2005 | 4 Comments
Clever Uses Of Google Maps
How often do you find yourself looking at something on the web saying “I wish I’d thought of that first“? It seems to happen to me every couple of days.
Since the release of Google Maps, there have been many clever (but simple) ideas that have done just this:
- Chicago Crime Maps - one of the first “mashups” of Google maps, links up with the police crime data to show crime hotspots.
- Housing Maps - houses for sale / rent shown by location.
- Google Sightseeing - why see the world for real?
- HotOrNot + Google Map - the classic rate-my-face website with the hotties or notties locations shown.
- HYDESim - the effect of a nuclear explosion on U.S. cities.
The most recent one to appear is so simple it hurts; gVisit.com tracks your last few visitor’s location, via Javascript embedded in your page, and maps them onto a Google Map. There are a few restrictions which may make it unsuitable for those with many visitors (not me then), but I’m pretty sure it would be easy for most developers to code something like this for their own sites if they wished (although you’ll probably need access to an IP-to-country database). I can see it might be something that I would incorporate into my simple stats packages I give to clients.
If you’re interested in making use of the maps yourself, there is now an API available to help you out, and there is a great Google Maps How-To giving details on implementing the maps and using all the different features that are available.
Most of the examples given above are intriguing if not particularly ground-breaking (although the housing maps are something that would be very useful if available everywhere), but I believe that with the growth internet use for finding local information, the kind of services that these ideas will inspire will become invaluable.
I’m sure there are plenty more ideas that can be developed based on mapping, and having a system that is so open to this sort of hacking is what really helps the ideas develop so quickly.
WV4 is the online home of Rob Lewis, featuring a blog covering a variety of subjects, mainly web design, CSS and PHP, as well as featuring useful links to other websites.
I liked the housing one, if you were to add data from upmystreet.co.uk it really would be an interesting application.
You might be onto something there Tom, although I’m not too sure how easy it would be to extract the upmystreet data would be. They should definitely consider doing something like that though.
If I had the time, I’d love to put together a very simple Google map with all the local houses for rent/sale (having just been through a house-hunt it is something I would have loved to have used).
It would be technically simple to do, but the amount of time it would take to keep up-to-date is what puts me off.
There needs to be some sort of standard for housing listings that can be transfered into XML, then estate agents could provide RSS feeds of their properties and we could link it to Google using the postcode or something. Possibly.
this is useless i cant evin put in my postcode in and find my house its way tripe
Hi, upmystreet charges around 1200 a year and you can pull out this info from them.
I am trying to build some interface for a client to populate google map with data from upmystreet.
If I manage it, I will write a small article on how I did it.
I like your site !
Francesco Vitetta