Happy Mappy 5th Birthday - Google Maps API

Happy Mappy 5th Birthday - Google Maps API

Google Maps API was released 5 years (today) ago and now there are 350,000 unique map 'mashups' truly amazing. Good luck to the next 5 years!


Keir Clarke - Google Maps Mania author created this 5th Birthday Google Map Mashup to display messages and map mashup - you can contribute by adding your message....

from the Official Post:
"Today is an important milestone here at Google and we’re all pretty excited - the Google Maps API turns 5! It was five years ago today that we posted a brief announcement to let the world know about the JavaScript Maps API and now 5 years later more than 350,000 active websites make use of it. Uses have ranged from tools that have made it easier to find an apartment, track the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and even make an Earth sandwich! Many, many more examples have been chronicled on sites like Mashable and the Google Maps Mania blog. In 2005, Adrian Holovaty launched the first crime mashup that overlaid Chicago’s public crime data onto online maps providing Chicago’s citizens and journalists with a true picture of crime in their city. The site won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism and was named by The New York Times as one of 2005's best ideas. In honor of this very special birthday, we took a chance to check back in with Adrian to see what he thought about the journey of the Google Maps API over the past 5 years:"

“Of my 11 years of doing Web development, Spring 2005 was the most interesting and exciting time. When Google Maps launched -- with maps assembled client-side, in JavaScript! -- I was one of the band of tinkerers around the globe who poked at Google's obfuscated code until we figured out how to embed their maps in our own pages. It was a ton of fun, not only doing the reverse engineering, but seeing the various discoveries and hacks other people were making: embedding multiple maps in a single page, swapping out the map tiles, using custom map markers, making markers move, loading real-time data onto maps... New discoveries were being made on a seemingly daily basis, and the best ones built on the other ones, which led to a sense of a community contributing to a greater understanding.

“These days, it's hard to fathom a Web without embeddable maps. Wasn't it always that way? To Google's eternal credit, instead of shutting these hacks down, they recognized the demand and legitimized it in the form of their mapping API.

“And the rest is... well, kind of boring in its simplicity, now that reverse engineering isn't involved. There was something raw and pure about those original hacks, like hunting and skinning your own food, living off the land, a digital self-sustainability. I feel like an old man yelling at kids to get off my lawn: ‘Back in my day, I had to reverse engineer Google's obfuscated JavaScript to get embeddable maps on my pages!’ You don't know how good you have it.”

The Google Maps API has seen some significant milestones of its own during the past five years. Some of the announcements we’re most proud of are the Maps API for Flash, Static Maps API, our Enterprise offering Maps API Premier, and the new Maps API v3, built with mobile use cases in mind and recently graduated from Code Labs. The Google Maps API has established itself as the most popular Google API and the most deployed service-based API on the web. We continue to be amazed by how popular this API continues to be for web and mobile apps being developed today. This ProgrammableWeb dashboard shows that of the apps built and submitted over the past 2 weeks, a quarter of them make use of the Google Maps API. Click the 'All Time' tab and you'll see that nearly half of the almost 5000 cataloged mashups use it.

Today, on this 5 year milestone, we really have all of you to thank for this incredible chapter in web and mapping development. The remarkable levels of innovation, creativity and interest have come from all of you. You saw the possibilities the Google Maps API held and what it could be combined with to create, and you built it. Now join us to celebrate! Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania has created a mashup that we want all of you to contribute to. Please tag your Google Maps mashup or tool to the map wherever you are:

Birthday Map
http://mappybirthday.appspot.com/

Original Post by Mike Pegg (former author & creator of Google Maps Mania)
http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-birthday-google-maps-api-turns-5.html

SpinCloud - Weather Mashup Map

SpinCloud - Weather Mashup Map


Nice integration of weather feeds and mapping from Google Maps. Easy to use.

"Weather mashup with tagging, forecasting, and commenting, plus personalization and weather tracking. RSS enabled. Registration via OpenId or Facebook Connect."

Find the Hottest, Coldest, Windiest, Rainiest, Snowiest or just a Snapshot of your local weather.

http://spincloud.com/

Wheres the path? Mapping Wins Award

The Excellent Mapping Mashup 'Wheres the path' will get more funding to be developed further :)

Congratulations to the author of the map Bill Chadwick

Annoucement:
Show Us a Better Way

"This competition is about how you can help us make better use of your data"

Out of the huge list of submitted ideas
http://www.showusabetterway.co.uk/call/ideas/index.html


Where is the path has been a hugely successful mashup.
(note the yellow bar in the bottom left corner is number of tile impressions - if goes red it is very close the daily limit.)


Now with even more new features:
1) Diagram of Magnetic, True and Grid North relationships

2) Estimated (Naismith) hiking times

3) Sunset calculator (to check if a planned route should end before dark).

Mapping Mashup
http://wheresthepath.googlepages.com/wheresthepath.htm

Another reminder to Ordnance Survey - raise the limit on OpenSpace tile impressions please - even for this one url. (currently OS tiles have a 30,000 limit per 24hrs - it needs to be 75,000 at least).

Mapperz