Not to highjack, but here is a Boston Globe story from today, 6/30/05, about Goggle Maps.
(PS-Thanks for this map Chris, I am working on some delivery info research and this map will be a great help in selecting target cities. S.D.)
Google points way to Maps' code
Move OK's sites' use of feature to create their own services
By Peter J. Howe, Globe Staff | June 30, 2005
Hacking Google Maps just went legitimate.
When the online information search giant launched a feature in February letting Web surfers pull up maps and satellite images of virtually any neighborhood in America, hackers quickly found the Google service made it possible to present data in cartographic format. Unlike existing services from Time Warner Inc.'s MapQuest.com and Yahoo Inc. that are limited to presenting information authorized by the portal -- like locations of pizza shops or bank machines -- Google Maps let people plug in their own data.
Computer-savvy info-lovers quickly rolled out what became dubbed ''Google mash-ups," using lists of apartments for rent and gas prices to create services that let Web users instantly generate maps of the closest cheap gas or pricey apartments. Other examples produced tools for mapping the locations of Florida registered sex offenders or types of crimes in Chicago neighborhoods.
As of early yesterday morning, Google went from more or less tolerating these services to actively promoting them. Hoping to unleash a wave of digital mapmaking creativity -- and down the road, some lucrative new advertising opportunities as well -- Google last night began publicizing the full version of the so-called application program interface for Google Maps that hackers had already begun sussing out to build their own services.
It's a move roughly equivalent to opening up a car hood so tinkerers can see how the engine works, or handing out the recipe for a popular dish.
''We certainly can't think of all the innovative things we can do with maps," said Bret Taylor, product manager for Google Maps. ''We know there are a lot of things we haven't thought of yet. There's already sort of an ad hoc community out there using Maps, and this really formalizes it."
Among other things, publicizing the programming interface will help websites that have built services on Google Maps keep them operating smoothly. In the United Kingdom, for example, a site called dynamite.co.uk used Google Maps to offer a service that can show the locations of all current traffic jams and accidents around London.
But after building a version that worked with one older version of Google Maps, the site yesterday warned: ''Due to the recent Google Maps update, this isn't working properly right now," requiring users to click a button to have data updated. Once the programming code and tools necessary to tie into Google Maps are public, problems like that should largely disappear, Taylor said. What data programmers need will be posted at
www.google.com/apis/.
Besides conventional maps and satellite images, Google this week also began making available -- through a site called Google Earth -- enhanced versions of what it calls three-dimensional maps. This feature correlates map grids with city skylines and topographical contours.
Erik Blankinship, a researcher with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab who has done extensive work in digital and Web-based cartography, said he expects that having access to the core technology will uncork a frenzy of new services and online tools by programmers.
''Google Maps wowed us all when it came out," Blankinship said. ''They got it right." Among other improvements over existing online services, he said, is the fact that users looking at a Google map on their screen can click over to an adjacent area without having to have the entire map reloaded, which makes it faster and smoother to use.
Colleagues at MIT's Media Lab this spring created a hack that let people assemble high-resolution wall-sized maps with street-by-street detail, before being asked by Google to take the service down because it violated Google limits on free, noncommercial use of the Maps service.
Illustrating the idea that a map can be worth at least the same 1,000 words as a picture, a Chicago citizens' anticrime group set up a way, using Google Maps, to produce instant maps of crime locations through
www.chicagocrime.org. Visitors can produce maps sorted to show, for example, 70 different kinds of crime within 25 police districts; the maps can be sorted further to show crimes at gas stations, bars, college dorms, or other locations.
Another site that has been temporarily shut down,
www.ahding.com/cheapgas/, takes gas prices listed at GasBuddy.com and charts them on a map to help motorists find the lowest-priced gasoline stations.
Jonathan Crowe, who compiles a Quebec-based weblog on developments in mapping, said that ''people are doing stuff with Google Maps that they can't do with anything else. It's the transparency of it," Crowe said, adding that linking into the Google mapping tools has been ''trivial for those who know their stuff."
Peter J. Howe can be reached at
[email protected].
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2005/06/30/google_points_way_to_maps_code/
