Six great Google Maps Mashups
Google Maps on its own is a wonderful application but mashups really make it one of a kind. Mashups are third party applications that use Google Maps and its API plus their own coding to create something new. I thought it would be nice to create a list of six great Google Maps mashups so that everyone who has not taken a closer look will have a good starting point and those who already know Google Maps and mashups might still find something they did not know about.
I think I found a great mix of interesting and helpful mashups. Some give you information prior to visiting a country, help you evaluate hotels, show you traveling routes and give you insights on what is being written in the local press. I did include two environmental mashups that simulate sea level risings and one that displays carbon emissions of your next flight.
1. Trivop Hotel Video Guide
I think that a Hotel Video Guide is an excellent idea for a Google Mashup. All hotels are placed on a world map, most of them in Europe, and you see the exact location of the hotel on the map. Clicking on a country or town will load the hotels in it displaying their position on the map.
Clicking on a hotel will load the video review which normally consists of several different videos showing the interior and exterior of the hotel. This is great for getting a first overview of how it all looks like. It is also possible to filter the hotels by location, price and star rating.
2. Everytrail - GPS maps and routes
Everytrail lets its users upload gps data and photos mashing them up with Google maps and making them available to everyone in the community. This is another excellent opportunity to get impressions of a certain area before you make your way to it. I especially like the visualization of the tours.
3. Terrapass - Calculate CO2 Emissions
The first of the two environmental mashups that I like. This simply calculates the CO2 emission of a flight that you enter displaying the results afterwards. Entering a city will automatically display the list of available airports which is nice if a city has more than one.
4. Floodmaps
With talk about sea level rising it is important to get a visual idea of what would happen if the sea level would rise for a certain amount of meters. Floodmaps simulates this by dynamically changing the map.
5. Outside.in
Read local news of more than 3500 towns in the United States. The mashup presents a Google map with all towns available loading local news at soon as a town is left-clicked.
Update: Outside has been acquired by Patch, a network of local news sites. Developers can integrate local news into web applications and mobile apps using Patch's News API now.
6. Earth Album
A Google Maps, Flickr and Youtube mashup. Selecting a country on the map displays images tagged with the country name in a thumbnail bar. Clicking on the thumbnail loads the image in a higher resolution.
It is possible to narrow down search results by looking specifically for castles, mountains, citys and food or use a custom keyword like a location that you would like to see.
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Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.