There’s nothing we like better than a good mash-up (here’s a couple of random examples). But when it comes to services that integrate data from multiple locations and draw their own conclusions, it’s always best to apply a little healthy cynicism.
From the thin files of the Decently Useful Facebook Apps Dept.: MapMotive puts your Facebook friends on a Google Map, making it easy to visit acquaintances while travelling, or just marvel at your social spread.
If you’re interested in panoramic photography, viewAt combines a panoramic maker with a Google Maps mashup so you can not only create interactive panoramas but geotag them and share them with the world.
Alright, it’s probably not going to do much for your productivity, but the notion of using Australian postcodes as instructions for a dot-to-dot image is still pretty cool.
If you’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s Live Mesh syncing technology and tried it on your Windows Mobile device, then Flickr2Mesh, a simple application to download photos from your Flickr account onto your hard drive or mobile phone, might be of interest. As Aussie Live Mesh guru Angus Logan points out on his blog, the code could also be used as the basis for an application giving you access to your photos on multiple devices. If you want to mass-download Flickr shots but aren’t ready for Live Mesh yet, check out previously mentioned Flump. Flickr2Mesh[via Angus Logan's Blog]
The new Sydney Sidetracks project from the ABC puts an intriguing twist on the Google Maps mash-up genre, linking historic video, audio and pictures to their locations online. Content on offer includes early images from Port Jackson in 1821, as well as more recent events such as the Hilton Hotel bombing. As well as being accessible on the site, you can download a version for use on your mobile phone, ideal for a walking tour of the inner-Sydney streets. With luck, we’ll see similar efforts for other cities in the future (the site structure suggests other locations could easily be added).
Sydney SidetracksLooking for the latitude and longitude of a particular address, to geotag a Flickr photo for instance? Tiny Geo-coder will give you results in an instant, and based on my tests is accurate even when the address isn’t perfect (for instance, leaving “street” out of a street number or using a city’s popular acronym). If you’re looking to automate multiple calls through a script or create map mashups, Tiny Geo-coder has an even lighter-weight API. Simply append a search term to the API url like the example for Perris, CA on the site’s homepage, and all the server will return is that geocode and nothing else. No API key or complicated parsing required. Nifty!
Tiny Geo-coder [via eHub]
