Posts Tagged ‘mashups’

Foursquare Heat Maps

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011

This is a pretty cool graphic interface I came across thanks to Giovanni Gallucci — it’s for checking out your Foursquare usage data: Where Do You Go. It displays your checkins using heat maps:

Where Do You Go - Foursquare Google Maps Mashup

The Google Maps mashup was built using Foursquare’s API, Python, and the Google APP Engine. I think it likely works better in Chrome or FireFox than in IE.

Creator Steven Lehrburger wrote that he created the display to graphically demonstrate to friends and acquaintances the areas which he frequents, and also as a project for a New York University mashups class he was taking.

It’s quite conceivable that Google could use similar user data in calculating personalized local search results and in figuring out the relative popularities of places within cities and neighborhoods. Google’s geolocation data for users is increasing and improving daily.

SepiaTown: Cool New Google Maps Mashup

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

SepiaTown - From Here To ThenSepiaTown (tagline: “From Here To Then”) is a cool Google Maps mashup that I recently ran across.

The service takes historical photos and maps them to their locations on a Google Map.

SepiaTown Example - Downtown San Francisco

The example screengrab above is from the historic Chinese Tung Food Company in downtown San Francisco, California.

The service is set up with a simple, “clean” feel, making it very easy to use.

I think that increasingly there will be instances of people taking various kinds of historical data like these vintage photograph images, and making more available through search engines and through Google Maps.

Imagine that it might be possible at some future point to click to slide some sort of tool in Google Maps which would move along a timeline, allowing one to only choose content from a particular, past timeframe.

Google Maps + Gmail = Snailmail

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

Student designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with an interesting mashup. The concept is that one could write a note in Gmail, then click to have it snailmailed for a small fee. The paper envelope for the mail would be printed up with route directions from Google Maps.

Rahul Mahtani and Yofred Moik: Google Maps Snailmail Concept

Google Maps Snailmail by Rahul Mahtani and Yofred Moik

I think the concept flies a bit in the face of the trends away from print media, but there’s something compelling about the idea all the same. I like the envelopes with destination/route map images printed on them, even though I think the actual route information would be of minor-to-no-use for delivery men. And, I think there’d definitely be some market for sending snailmail notes from the Gmail interface.

(from Yanko Design)