LBY3
The continuing adventures of Beau Yarbrough

Google, Yahoo: “Hack our maps!”

Sunday, July 3, 2005, 9:09
Section: Miscellany

From Wired: Yahoo! Maps and Google Maps both decide to embrace the hacking of their applications and enable it with more programming info (and future advertising possibilities for them).

Not surprisingly, the two companies have different rules.

Yahoo is a bit more flexible in the kinds of data that can be passed and uses several open data standards, including RSS. The company also hosts the resultant map on its own servers, which could save hackers from having to pay for expensive bandwidth if their application becomes popular. It also allows Yahoo to serve advertising, if it chooses. However, the hosting offer is not negotiable, even for geeks with deep pockets who want the map featured on their own website.

Google, on the other hand, expects developers to host their own hacks by running Google’s innovative JavaScript to power the map’s smooth rendering, but reserves the right to place ads next to the mashup map in the future.

There are quite a few neat examples of the maphacks linked to in the article:

  • The Chicago crime maphack is neat if you don’t live on the eastern side of the map.
  • Traffic camera locations in London and the Bay Area.
  • The marriage of Google and Yahoo traffic and weather maps.
  • Not in the article is this geographic representation of where American Iraq war casualties are from. I had no idea so many of the initial casualties were Californian.
  • Also not in the article is this site that lets you smoothly slide between map and satellite modes and all points in between. A way to make the old Google Maps “hey, I can see my house on the satellite map” game a bit more fun. (Source.)
  • “Gee, I wonder where on the running of the bulls route folks got injured this year.” Lucky you, someone has done the work for you! Amazing what you can find on the Internet. (Source.)

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