“I was watching TV and noticed an informercial for cure-all vitamin supplement with a unique map background,” writes John Deal, who immediately grabbed a camera and took a few shots for Strange Maps. Good reflexes, John!
“It kind of remembers your Larry King map (#242) - but worse. Australia is still drifting north and Africa has moved into position between Europe and North America. There are two Asias but South America has sunk into Atlantic. Sad. All those poor Brazilians, gone forever.”
A map in a TV studio background performs the same function as a diploma on a professional’s consulting room: it lends an aura of respectability and believability to what goes on there. Maybe putting a really awful map like this in a TV studio background is a subconscious, subliminal way of conveying a message to the viewing public: don’t believe a word we’re saying!
Peter Batty gave a presentation at the GeoWeb conference last week that has generated quite a lot of positive press. In the presentation Peter explains his thoughts on the future of location based social networking, as well as introducing his future location service whereyougonnabe (more of which tomorrow).
I really like Peter’s distinction between current and future location applications and I thought it would be interesting to have a quick look at the examples he gives of each type of application. Tomorrow I’ll have a look at future location services but today I’ll concentrate on the examples of current location applications that he mentions in the presentation.
Zkout Zkout connects users to their friends and to recommended places that are near by. Zkout automatically tells your friends what you are doing and where you are in real time from your mobile phone or computer.
The service allows you to explore what’s happening in your area right now on Google Maps, find out where your friends are and what they are doing right now and it also allows you to share videos and pictures from your mobile phone.
FireEagle Yahoo’s FireEagle is still in invite only beta. If you can get an account FireEagle lets you share your location with sites and services online. In essence FireEagle is an intermediary between your location devices (phone, lap-top, GPS etc) and location based web sites like Google Maps.
Lokilets you share your location with your friends via Google Maps. You can change your location at your own MyLoki page or (and this is the clever bit) you can download the Loki toolbar for your browser and update your location automatically.
The Loki toolbar can triangulate your location automatically. You can then share your location with your friends in a number of different ways. You can share the address of your own public page or you can embed a map in your blog to show your last recorded location or add a map to your Facebook account.
Dodgeball Google owned Dodgeball is a mobile phone service that lets you find friends near by and inform any friends near by of your location. The service lets you ‘crush’ on friends on-line and also tells you when your ‘crush’ is near by.
Dodgeball also informs you of venues that are near your current location.
Where.com Where.com have a number of location based widgets for your mobile phone. The widgets will help you find venues in your vicinity or connect you with friends nearby. Where.com delivers the best in local information from Eventful, Yelp, GasBuddy, Zipcar, ShopLocal, Starbucks, Buddy Beacon and more.
Postscript Anyone wondering about Peter Batty’s surname might be interested to know that the name is common in Yorkshire, England and is often used as an example to show how genealogy can be used to illustrate social migration over time.
The two maps above show how the name Batty has migrated southwards in the UK between 1881 and 1998. I obtained the maps from National Trust Names.
For as long as I’ve worked at Microsoft I’ve seen this issue with a 10,000 pushpin limit in MapPoint 2002, 2004, 2006 and, yes, it still exists in 2009. The issue is this: if you try to import more than 10,000 addresses into MapPoint you’ll get the error, “Only 10000 records may be mapped at one time using street address.”
The limitation is there for a couple reasons - one around performance and the other around keeping people from obtaining free geocodes from the MapPoint 2009.
So, how do you you overcome this if you just want to map more than 10,000 points? The answer - you have to geocode your data source prior to importing into MapPoint 2009. Once you have your data geocoded, you’ll want to add two additional columns do your data source - latitude and longitude. MapPoint 2009 (or 2006) will automatically detect the data type in the columns and set your record matching type to Latitude & Longitude. You’ll notice the performance is greatly improved by doing this as well because you no longer have to wait for the address location to be found and then placed on the map. You need only wait for the software to parse the geocodes out of your data set and pin them to the map.
Where do you get geocodes? You can use any number of geocoders on the web, or you can use Virtual Earth or MapPoint Web Service for this. I even wrote you a nice little blog entry called “Geocoding with Virtual Earth” for you to leverage in just this situation. Warning, though. Most geocodes are not free and come with a terms of use. For example, you can use Virtual Earth or MapPoint Web Service geocodes as long as they are used in a Microsoft mapping application. In other words, you can take our geocodes and use them on someone else’s mapping platform. But, you can use Virtual Earth geocodes on MapPoint Web Service or MapPoint and vice versa with the other products on the other respective products.
MapPoint 2009 release dates: North American Version - September 1, 2008; European Version - January 1, 2009. You may be able to purchase MapPoint 2009 in a retail store prior to these dates, but you can purchase them as a part of your Microsoft Enterprise Agreement on or after these dates.
And for the record, yes, I’m actively working to get the limitation removed altogether.
