Google Maps Mashups
March 27th, 2009
I’ve always loved maps, and when google maps came out they raised the bar. After they released their maps API and the mashups began. The first cool one I remember was a craigslist mashup that listed all apartments for rent on a map – that’s huge when you’re new to a city, and invaluable in renting-competitive cities like NY and SF. Now there are tons of mashups out there, and here’s a few that I’ve found recently.
Random mashups (coolest ones first)
- Craigslist Housing/Rentals Maps – awesome new padmapper.com (iphone) plus mapskreig.com and original housingmaps.com (stale data) (compete)
- Wikimapia.org (10+ Million entries) like wikipedia, but for maps. See My Seward St Slides entry.
- Fastfoodmaps.com shows fast food joints, updates map when you zoom in/out,
- Walkjogrun.net shows good search bar, nice overlays when looking at a route.
- Taxiwiz.com calculates taxi fares between points in major cities. I like how they add points in google maps
- tmeet.me auto-fill a tweet with current time & coordinates
- SeeClickFix identify local issues (pot hole, sign broken), submit, and watch for fix ..
- Dualmaps combines bird’s eye view with street view and maps
- Pizzashare maps meets pizza meets crowdsourcing (seems buggy, but cool idea)
- Beerhunter.ca find places to get beer in Toronto – right now!
- Diaroogle.com find a clean toilet in NYC
- chicago crimes. lots of interesting data from everyblock, including homegrown maps.
- findbyclick – change maps, results not updated, data is 2007, blog seems current
- Performance/Scaling – spacial databox – great if you have millions of data points
Build your own map: (sorted by compete monthly usage 2/2008-2/2009 more)
- Weddingmapper.com – (130K) great UI for novice (ex)
- Platial.com (120k) slick UI, tons of features, not all work (ex, ex2) (faq) iphone (blog)
- Frappr.com (100k) similar to platial.com, more like myspace for maps
- Communitywalk.com (100k) lots of users/examples, issues on firefox 3 (comments at bottom)
- Zeemaps.com (40k) pretty cool (chicago, sf parks)
- YourGmap.com (20k) easiest setup, good for people who’ve never used google maps (ex)
- Mapbuilder.net (20k) easy setup, can control html for each marker (img, links) (ex)
- Tagzania.com (20k) too much non-map stuff on the page
- Wayfaring.com (15k) clean and slick UI, little data (copyright 2007) (ex)
- My Atlas – clean, but not easy for novices (ex)
Find more maps (reference)
- programmableweb.com
- googlemapsmania blog lists many cool maps
- keirclarke.googlepages.com s
What’s your favorite map?