Archive for the ‘Location’ Category

File Under: Location, Web Services
Oct
27
2011

Google Plans to Charge Maps Developers

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Bad news, map hackers; the Google Maps free ride may be coming to and end. The Google Geo Developers blog recently detailed some changes to Google Maps API, including new rate limits and fees. Starting next year Google Maps will charge $4 per 1,000 map loads on sites where traffic exceeds 25,000 map loads per day.

The good news is that very small sites will remain unaffected since the Google Maps API will still be free for the first 25,000 views per day (those using the Google Maps styling features will be limited to 2,500 views a day).

The bad news is that once your app or website exceeds those limits you’ll be forking out $4 for every 1,000 people that hit your site (or view a map in your mobile app). Alternately, developers can cough up $10,000+ for a Google Maps API Premier licence, which, in addition to the unlimited access offers more advanced geocoding tools, tech support, and control over any advertising shown.

Google says the new fees are intended to make sure Google Maps remains free for small developers. “By introducing these limits we are ensuring that Google can continue to offer the Maps API for free to the vast majority of developers for many years to come,” writes Google Maps API manager Thor Mitchell.

The new rates will kick in next year and are unlikely to impact small sites, which will never exceed the limits, or large sites which can afford the Premier license. The real impact is in the middle — experimental sites that do something creative with Google Maps and end up going viral. No one wants a one-off experiment to end up costing a fortune.

Fortunately, according to the FAQ, sites that exceed the limits without setting up a payment system or buying a Premier license won’t immediately be shut down. “Your maps will continue to function,” says the Google FAQ, however, “a warning may be shown on your map and a Maps API Premier sales manager may contact you to discuss your licensing options.”

In other words, Google appears to be interested mainly in collecting fees from sites with consistently heavy traffic rather than experiments that see a one-time traffic spike. It doesn’t protect against every potentially expensive use case, but it should make map mashup fans breathe a little easier.

Developers worried about the potential costs of the Google Maps API can always use OpenStreetMap, which is free and, in many parts of the world, much more detailed than Google Maps. Of course, OpenStreetMap lacks some Google Maps features, most notably an equivalent to Street View.

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File Under: Backend, Location, servers, Web Basics
Aug
31
2011

OpenDNS and Google Working with CDNs on DNS Speedup

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A group of DNS providers and content delivery network (CDN) companies have devised a new extension to the DNS protocol that that aims to more effectively direct users to the closest CDN endpoint. Google, OpenDNS, BitGravity, EdgeCast, and CDNetworks are among the companies participating in the initiative, which they are calling the Global Internet Speedup.

The new DNS protocol extension, which is documented in an IETF draft, specifies a means for including part of the user’s IP address in DNS requests so that the nameserver can more accurately pinpoint the destination that is topologically closest to the user. Ensuring that traffic is directed to CDN endpoints that are close to the user could potentially reduce latency and congestion for high-impact network services like video streaming.

The new protocol extension has already been implemented by OpenDNS and Google’s Public DNS. It works with the CDN services that have signed on to participate in the effort. Google and OpenDNS hope to make the protocol extension an official IETF standard. Other potential adopters—such as Internet ISPs—are free to implement it from the draft specification.

It’s not really clear in practice how much impact this will have on network performance. It’s worth noting that GeoIP lookup technology is already used by some authoritative DNS servers for location-aware routing. The new protocol extension will reportedly address some of the limitations of previous approaches.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

File Under: Frameworks, Location, Programming
Mar
1
2011

Who Swears the Most? How Foursquare Used Hadoop to Find Out

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We told you who swears the most in their code, but what about in the real world? Foursquare, the location check-in service, has used its rather large dataset to graph the “rudest” places in the English-speaking world — Manchester, U.K. takes top honors.

While the results should be taken with a grain of salt — after all the swearing is limited to Foursquare users and there’s no hint of what constitutes a swear word — the methods Foursquare used to get the data make a great intro to the world of Apache Hadoop and Apache Hive.

Hadoop is an open-source MapReduce framework — a way of processing huge datasets stored in large server clusters (or grids). While MapReduce frameworks were originally introduced by Google (which has very large datasets to work with) they’ve since grown beyond Google and their usefulness isn’t limited to large companies with massive databases.

In fact, with Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce just about anyone can easily and cheaply run their own Hadoop framework and process vast amounts of data just like Google does.

Because word search processing is generally considered the canonical example of what makes a MapReduce framework useful, Foursquare’s blog post offers a good overview of how you can use MapReduce to mine through anything from large text documents to user-contributed data like the check-in snippets Foursquare is processing.

Foursquare’s server setup is specific to them, but there’s one key element that’s worth bearing in mind — store your Hadoop data well away from your production system. MapReduce doesn’t work at the speed of the web and you don’t want it dragging your site down.

In Foursquare’s case that means using Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce plus a simple Ruby on Rails server. The result is, as Foursquare Engineer Matthew Rathbone puts it, “a powerful (and cheap) data analysis tool.”

If you’re new to MapReduce and functional programming in general, read through the Foursquare post for an overview on how MapReduce is useful and then check out the Hadoop site, as well as this overview video from Cloudera.

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File Under: Location
Mar
1
2011

Google Street View, Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You

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Google Street View inside the San Diego Art Institute gardens

It’s time for Google to rename its Street View feature. Google Maps’ Street View is no longer limited to streets, the company is now using tricycles to photograph off-road locations like the gardens at the San Diego Art Institute or Château de Chenonceaux in Civray-de-Touraine, France.

Google has been using the modified trikes — which house a 360° panoramic camera much like the setup on the Street View cars, but smaller and lighter — since 2009. Google previously released imagery the trikes captured in places like Stonehenge and Sea World.

Combine the latest update with Google’s previous release of Street View inside buildings and it isn’t hard to imagine that, in the future, Street View may well be in your living room.

In fact, you may be the one who puts Street View in your living room. Last year Google acquired Quiksee, an app that takes normal video input and produces video tours — much like Street View, but with no special camera required. Although Google has made no announcements since the acquisition, it’s not hard to imagine the company releasing some software that allows anyone to create Street View-like images of, well, just about anywhere.

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File Under: Location, Web Apps, Web Services
Nov
30
2010

Mining Flickr to Build 3D Models of the World

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Microsoft’s PhotoSynth tool is jaw-droppingly awesome. But, because it’s a Microsoft project, the technology is unlikely to appear on some of your favorite non-Microsoft online apps, like Google Maps or Flickr.

However, our friends at ReadWriteWeb stumbled across a very similar tool — at least in terms of the end result — developed by the University of North Carolina in conjunction with Swiss university, ETH-Zurich.

The team has developed a method for creating 3D models by pulling in millions of photographs from Flickr and using some fancy algorithms to generate 3D models of local landmarks. Perhaps even more impressive the results can be generated using a single computer in under a day.

Project lead Jan-Michael Frahm touts the project’s efficiency saying, “our technique would be the equivalent of processing a stack of photos as high as the 828-meter Dubai Towers, using a single PC, versus the next best technique, which is the equivalent of processing a stack of photos 42 meters tall — as high as the ceiling of Notre Dame — using 62 PCs. This efficiency is essential if one is to fully utilize the billions of user-provided images continuously being uploaded to the internet.”

While the results are cool and would make an impressive addition to any number of geo-based services, more serious use cases include helping disaster workers get a better idea of where they’re headed and the extent of damage.

So far the researchers have released a movies demonstrating the technique on landmarks in both Rome (get it? built in a day…) and Berlin, and the results are impressive. For more information on how the process works, check out the UNC website.

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File Under: Location, Social
Nov
16
2010

Google Hotpot Smartens Up Local Search, But It’s No Yelp Killer

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Google has unveiled the awkwardly-named Hotpot, which is a kind of ratings tool and recommendation engine for Google Places.

As you review restaurants, music venues, stores and the like, Hotpot’s recommendation engine learns what you like and suggests other places you might like. Throw in recommendations from friends and Hotpot starts to sound very useful. Indeed Hotpot is useful, bringing location-based searching, algorithms that learn what you like and friends’ recommendations together in a single place.

But, perhaps because of that combination of features, it’s also awkward to set up and poorly integrated with the rest of Google’s services. It has some features that trump its main competitor, Yelp, like the awesome search tool. But the social and community aspects of Hotpot — features Yelp handles well — are too difficult to get set up.

Which isn’t to say that Hotpot isn’t useful. You just have to clear its awkward silo-style hurdles first. If you head over to the new Hotpot URL, you’ll be asked to sign in with your Google account and then to pick a nickname for use on Google Places.

Once that’s done you’ll need to find your friends and “add” then to your list of Hotpot friends. Setting up Hotpot feels a bit like you just slipped back in time five years to a web where every social service is an island.

It could be that Google was worried about another Buzz-style backlash if it made Hotpot’s social features automated. Instead, everything is manual — you’re presented with a list of friends that you can add (follow might be the more familiar verb here) much like the process Google Reader uses.

However, with Reader the sharing notices are sent inside the Reader web app. With Hotpot, the notices are sent to your friend’s Gmail account for approval. Worse, there doesn’t seem to be an “Add all” button — if you’ve got 300 friends, you’ll be click “Add” 300 times.

Once you’ve made it past the initial hurdles of setting Hotpot up, its results are actually pretty good. Having only tested Hotpot for a few hours, it’s hard to judge the quality of recommendations, but as a simple Google Places search tool, the interface is clean and easy to use.

Continue Reading “Google Hotpot Smartens Up Local Search, But It’s No Yelp Killer” »

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File Under: Location, Web Services
Oct
7
2010

Personalize Your Map With a Custom Map Marker

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If you’re adding a map to your website, why settle for the vanilla design when you can customize it and leave your own personal mark?

This tutorial will show you how to create a custom map from scratch, then add a little unique flavor to it by replacing the standard “map pin” icon with a custom icon of your own design.

To do this, we’ll be using Mapstraction, a library that creates map code that can be reused across all the big mapping providers (Yahoo, Google, et al). Mapstraction also allows for multiple types of customization such as custom info bubbles and graphics like the one we’ll be dropping onto the map.

Note: This tutorial is adapted from the book Map Scripting 101 by Adam DuVander. Adam is a former Webmonkey contributor and executive editor of Programmable Web. In his book, he shows how to use all of the features of the most popular mapping APIs, and how to mash them up with data from other sources like events calendars, weather services and restaurant review sites to make a variety of custom maps.

This exercise comes from chapters 1 and 2 of Adam’s book, and it is reprinted here with his permission and that of the book’s publisher, No Starch Press. It isn’t a word-for-word excerpt. It has been slightly adapted to work as a web tutorial. You’ll find dozens of in-depth exercises — including the full version of this one — in the book itself.

Create a Mapstraction map

Mapstraction is a little different from Google Maps and Yahoo Maps. Mapstraction is an open source JavaScript library that ties into other mapping APIs. If you use Mapstraction, you can switch from one type of map to another with very little work, as opposed to rewriting your code completely.

Using Mapstraction limits your risk to changes being made to an API. For example, if your site’s traffic takes you beyond the limit for your chosen provider, or the provider begins placing ads on the map, Mapstraction lets you switch providers quickly and inexpensively.

To use Mapstraction, you must first choose a provider. In this example, I’m using Mapstraction to create a Google Map.
Continue Reading “Personalize Your Map With a Custom Map Marker” »

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File Under: APIs, Location, Social
Aug
19
2010

Facebook Opens Up Places in its API

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Less than a full day after launching its new location-sharing feature, Facebook has opened up Places to developers.

Thursday afternoon, developers gained access to users’ check-in data via Facebook’s Graph API. Developers can also access check-in data from locations, like restaurants and businesses, to see who’s checked in there.

As we mentioned in our coverage of Wednesday evening’s launch, the Places data is read only for now. Applications can’t write or search Places data through the API. Those features are only available to Facebook’s launch partners for Places — Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah — while the kinks get ironed out. Everyone will get access to write and search Places data within a few months, according to Facebook.

The documentation for the Graph API has been updated to provide instructions for calling Places.

So sayeth the man page: “Every check-in is associated with a check-in ID that represents an object in the graph. Check-ins are associated with locations represented by Facebook Pages; the location must have a Facebook Page ID, whether the Page was created on Facebook directly or using the Open Graph protocol.”

If you don’t want to join in any of Facebook’s check-in reindeer games, the How-To Wiki has instructions on disabling Places in your account.

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File Under: Location, Visual Design
Aug
19
2010

Beautiful Websites: Stamen’s Pretty Maps

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We’ve seen some colorful map mashups in the past, like Hypercities and HeatMap, but few are as abstract and beautiful to look at as Stamen Design’s Pretty Maps.

The aptly-named app pulls sets of geodata from various freely available open mapping projects and plots them atop one another. Pretty Maps grabs street-level data from OpenStreetMap (the “Wikipedia of maps”), land formation data from Natural Earth and place-name and place-shape data from Flickr shapefiles — Flickr’s outlines generated by the tags people have attached to photos taken in that place. So all the data is from crowdsourced databases and either public domain or licensed through the Creative Commons. The maps are generated using TileStache and PolyMaps, two open source tools developed in-house at Stamen.

The result is a map that’s not so much usable for navigation as it is pretty to look at. Cities degrade into abstract and unique blobs, with pastel colors overlaying one another. The shapes are alien looking in texture and density, but instantly recognizable if you’re already familiar with the terrain.
Continue Reading “Beautiful Websites: Stamen’s Pretty Maps” »

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File Under: Location, Social
Aug
19
2010

‘Places’ Turns Facebook Into a Location Sharing Powerhouse

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Facebook has jumped on the location check-in bandwagon with a new feature known as Places. Facebook Places has launched with four partners, all services that already offer check-in services — Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp and Booyah.

If you use Foursquare, Brightkite or other location check-in services there isn’t much to see in Facebook Places. The only real difference is the scale that Facebook brings to the table.

Places is already available to most in the U.S. in their desktop browsers on Thursday. To use Places on your mobile, you’ll either need to download the new Facebook iPhone app (version 3.2, which is available now), or you can head to the Facebook mobile site with a web browser that supports the Geolocation API (basically anything but IE).

To read full coverage of the Places launch announcement on Wednesday night, read Ryan Singel’s report on Wired’s Epicenter blog.

While Facebook isn’t doing much with location that hasn’t already been done at least half a dozen other services, it does of course bring location sharing to Facebook’s massive user base of 500 million people around the world. Eventually, all of them will get access to Places once it rolls out in other countries. In the past that user base hasn’t been very welcoming of new features, especially features that involve privacy changes. While Places will be activated for all accounts, by default your location won’t be broadcast to everyone — just your friends.

To use the new feature, you can actively check in to a location, or you can let your friends check you in to a location without doing anything. While this may ruffle your feathers, if you don’t want people knowing where you are, it’s pretty simple to disable your friends’ ability to check you in, and to just ignore the check-in button.

According to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Places has three goals: helping people share where they are, seeing which of your friends are close by, and seeing what other places of interest are near you.

Continue Reading “‘Places’ Turns Facebook Into a Location Sharing Powerhouse” »

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