API
Embed Google Earth Into Any Map On Your Website!
Thursday, May 29th, 2008 | API, Mashup, News, visual effects | No Comments
Now you can embed Google Earth into your website or even any pre-existing Google Maps using their recently updated API. With just a simple line of Javascript you can take any existing map and make it 3D using the parameters already in place, thus over-laying your map markers onto the actual satellite view of the area.
This is a pretty cool new feature, imagine someone mapping out all the disc golf courses in the US, then when you select one from the large map, it goes into a google earth view letting you actually SEE the course itself. A very nice addition to the Google API library.
To incorporate it into your site, either go to the Google Earth API page, or the Google Maps API site. Either one will explain how to properly embed the service into you page/application.
Yahoo Wants You To Stalk Your Friends - Introducing Fire Eagle
Friday, March 7th, 2008 | API, Beta, Mashup, Tools, Twitter, WebApps | No Comments
Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, their first Rails-based web-app that enables you to share your location with other users/services in a variety of ways. It’s still in “beta” mode, but they were smart and came up with a clever way for you to instantly get an invite - By using an already-made mashup incorporating the instant updates. In this case, they chose to use Twitter to interact w/ their api. And after looking at the sample code, it’s pretty easy to setup too. In order to get an instant invite to check-out this beta-release for yourself:
1) First you must have a twitter account (which if you’re reading this blog i’m assuming you already do, even if it was only used once to see what the whole “Twitter” thing was about), you will then need to “follow” DangerDay. That can be done by clicking on the follow link in his profile page or by simply twittering “follow dangerday”
Danger Day will then immediately return the favor by following your twitter account as well, thus enabling you to be able to direct message each other.
2) Now that you’re following DangerDay, you need to get an invite, so next up is direct messaging dangerday with the word “invite”. Once again, this can be done by twittering “d dangerday invite”
DangerDay will then respond with a link for you to follow, enabling you to sign-up on the FireEagle page for an account…what a nice guy
3) Now once you’ve got your account squared away, why not test it out with dangerday? In order to update him as well as the entire Fire Eagle Service as to your location, all you need to do is direct message him again with “u location_here”.. for example: “d dangerday u Atlanta, GA” - that will let dangerday AND Fire Eagle know that I’m currently in Atlanta, GA.
This service, like all other social-dependent ones, will live or die based on whether or not developers get involved and come up with interesting mashups. Right now there are already popular sites that could benefit from being able to twitter or IM an updated location (or be automatically fed coordinates via GPS enabled phones), a good example would be the social travel site Dopplr. This dependency on developers adopting their free Yahoo service isn’t something that I feel is lost on the guys behind this project either - they’re using standardized, open-source tools like OAuth that coders are already familiar with. If they make it easy to incorporate, then they’ve got a better chance of someone using it in their application, even if just for fun. If it was incorporated into a web-app, just using the user’s IP would result in knowing their location and being able to update the service….so the possibilities are endless.
It’s already been incorporated into Facebook so that you can easily stalk follow your friends, I’m sure they’re always just dying to know where I am at all times. Although I will say this - A service like this could come in handy if you were part of a big group trying to meet-up in a crowded location (i.e. somewhere in Austin this weekend for SXSW). One SMS sent to Fire Eagle and then all your buddies would know where you were (i.e. “Already at the bar waiting for you guys to get here!”). And if your phone has GPS enabled, I wouldn’t have even had to send the text, Fire Eagle gives you the option of letting your phone auto-update their service with your whereabouts. Now to find out where another user is, you would only have to use something as simple as the twitter or AIM example from above. So to show you how this works, let’s go back to our good friend dangerday. Direct message him with “q brentter” and it’ll respond with my most recent location (for you non-twitters, that means you’d type: “d dangerday q brentter” but without the quotes).
With the recent release of the iPhone SDK, I can only imagine this service being experimented with alongside the new framework - Erica Sadun in fact has already released an application for your iPhone called firefindme that does just that but without using GPS. Instead she uses another Yahoo service called Zone Tag, which was initially released as a way to geo-tag your Flickr photos based on specific “location tags” that you would assign them (or if you had a phone w/ built-in GPS, it would automatically do it for you).
So far the Developer section of the Fire Eagle site has been steadily growing, with it currently showcasing quick starts, examples api code (right now though only in javascript, php, perl, python, and ruby), and options on various open-source ways to authenticate user sessions. It also looks like they’re hoping to build an application gallery/showcase into the site.
This has some pretty good potential, although personally I feel it’s somewhat of a stretch for it to be utilized in anything major.
And i’m not even going to get into how privacy goes through the window if your phone is sending a webservice updates on where you are. Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb shares similar concerns about the idea of allowing others to track your every movement (You are given the option of it not automatically pinging your GPS enabled phone to update your location, but just like when Facebook announced their new “mini-feed service,” it just gives give me a the creeps)
[source for some of this information came from Jesse Newland's Blog - SoylentFoo]
Search
Find A New Job:
Other Places You Can Find Me:
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
