Google Maps Hacks

Chapter 3. Mashing Up Google Maps

Hacks 17–28: Introduction

In music, when you create a new song by taking the melody from one song and the lyrics from another, it is called a mashup. A lot of times things go poorly, but now and then the results are stunning. What happens when you take pieces from two web sites and mix them together? You get a Web 2.0 mashup.

The Web is moving from a collection of disconnected web sites to a ubiquitous computing platform. This new reality is often referred to as Web 2.0. In the beginning, we had static web sites with a few links between them. This evolved into dynamic content and data-driven sites. The next step has been using the web as a platform.

eBay is a useful site for buying and selling trinkets, trash, or treasure. In that role, it is what might be called “Web 1.5.” But eBay is also a platform. There is a whole ecology that has built up around eBay that uses the platform in ways that were not initially intended by the programmers.

Amazon and Google Search have also become platforms. Amazon, eBay, and Google (not to mention Flickr, del.icio.us, and many more) have created public Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow anyone to mix and match information from one site with information from another.

The missing piece in the ecology of open web APIs has been location. Nearly everything we do, on the Web or off, has a location. Everything we touch, write about, read, think, or work on has to happen somewhere. Everything has a geospatial ...