Facibus Reviews

Steve Collins and family are mapping their big trip online. It’s one of the best geomashup ideas that I’ve seen that wasn’t commercial or contrived (by contrived I mean that the maps dont’ add a lot to the information). The commercial sites are cool - see ProgrammableWeb for some fine examples.

When does mapping add value? I guess it is where the information needs to be displayed geospatially. There are a lot of things (like statistics) that can be presented against maps - I did it myself on the MonsterWatch wiki. That said, the mapping on MonsterWatch was more about learning how MediaWiki worked rather than a strictly useful map-driven application.

So rather than what CAN be displayed geospatially, what actually NEEDS to be? That is, when does the geospatial presentation add enough value such that it becomes essential? One no-brainer is the street map - where you need to navigate to where you are going. Another is “where is my nearest …?” store/hospital/Japanese restaurant.

Programmableweb gives the following examples:

Tesco’s Store Locator: I’m not sure if Microsoft Virtual Earth is responsible for the slowness of this mashup - but it works poorly in both MSIE 7 and FireFox 2 for me But if you want to find your nearest Tesco store, it works more or less correctly (typing in “Australia” gave me a map centering on the British Museum in London. How did they know it was my favourite part of the UK? ).

The Orginal Wii Locator: This helps you find a Nintendo Wii. It would, that is, if you live in the Continental USA. It does interrogate a number of different sources (ebay, WalMart, Target, BestBuy) and is potentially quite helpful.

Weather Bonk: This site actually works for me - that is, it provides me with information that I can use (my local weather). Seeing it presented on a map doesn’t add any value, but at least the underlying technology looks like it is delivering. It does show me traffic cameras in Sydney (the nearest to my location) - if I lived in Sydney, this would be fairly important information.

I suppose that I cannot expect every geomashup to be all things to all people - they are all slicing and dicing the available information in different ways to different audiences. I’ll keep an eye out for something useful to come.