Map Scripting

In the past I’ve been pretty harsh on the mapping trailblazer, MapQuest. I called them copycats and said they are grasping for relevance. While they aren’t exactly at the top of their game, they’re still trying, and in some cases succeeding.

The local interface to add pre-selected types of markers is one of those highlights. It’s great–you can find post offices, parking, gas stations and plenty more. And it’s fast. The part that’s really neat, which shows in the above screenshot, is how MapQuest handles markers that would ordinarily show up too close to each other.

Overlapped and clumped together markers are not very useful without zooming in. MapQuest creates a new type of marker to represent two or more markers. Then, you can click the special icon to zoom in automatically. It makes for a cleaner view, while making it obvious where they have aggregated results.

I’ll probably use a similar system to upgrade my “Where I’m Writing” feature on the site. The area around my house is starting to look clumpy. It shocks me to heap praise upon MapQuest, but this is well done. I’d like to see a tool for something like this incorporated into their API.

Let’s assume that every bit of content in the future will be easily geo-tagged. That means it will be easily searchable. In turn, messages like the above from Twitter, will be quite easily discovered by the people who are being discussed.

Does that mean gossip will die? Unlikely, but it’s bound to change how people go about it. For most people, having an idea of who is listening alters what they say.

David Stuart gets to the crux of the issue:

“Whilst these comments have always been shared amongst friends, they have never been made so publicly and permanently available.”

Rather than change their ways, users will likely require privacy settings that enable them to only reach their friends. Or, we’ll at least need methods to selectively remove our location.

Or maybe location will kill gossip. But I tend to put my money on technology adapting to users, rather than vice-versa, at least in the short term.

Portland-based location-sharing startup Shizzow took down the Beta sign. Anyone can now join the site and share their location.

I’ve been using the service almost daily since August. Yes, there are other services with similar features, but this is where my friends are. Several times I’ve been in downtown Portland looking for coffee shop co-working and used Shizzow to help me find the hangout-of-the-day.

Plus, Shizzow views itself as a platform first and a site second. Shizzow launched with an API, a feature shockingly absent from data-hoarding Latitude.

While it’s missing the snazzy iPhone app of competitor BrightKite, I’m sure that’s coming from developers. And there’s probably a bunch of cool stuff coming that the small Shizzow team wouldn’t be able to create on their own.

My friends at Wired’s Epicenter blog have a great, solid write-up of Shizzow’s launch.

Earlier this month, Google announced Latitude, a tool to “see where your friends are.” To location fans like me, the service itself isn’t that interesting. It’s a watered down version of what others do better. What’s exciting is that Google Latitude is legitimizing a technology fraught with privacy concerns.

Most people, even those usually in the ravenous early adopter crowd, cringe at the idea of sharing their location. There was more than a touch of “I don’t want people to know where I am all the time” in Wired’s recent geo coverage. Reactions to Latitude were similar. PC World gave three reasons not to use Latitude, which all essentially boil down to privacy.

These discussions about privacy delight me. They need to happen in order for location-based services to move into the mainstream. By releasing Latitude, Google is fast-tracking the process and putting their weight behind sharing location.

For a comparison, look at how social networking has changed within the last five years. Heck, just look at how it’s changed in the last year or even six months. There was a lot of skepticism a few years ago and there has been a lot of talk about privacy since then. Most importantly, there has been a lot of adoption recently. Location sharing will be the same way once we determine the balance of privacy and utility.

Yes, there are plenty of things I wish were different about Latitude. I wish it had launched with an API. I wish there was some other way to share my data outside of the map. I wish it wasn’t so clunky.

It’s certainly not innovative. Most important to me is what it means for the future of location sharing. There is it blazing a trail.

The cover of the most recent Wired was devoted to what it calls the “GPS Revolution.” Of course, the trend of location-based services goes beyond global positioning systems. Much of the coverage was devoted to discussion of mobile computing’s role.

Mathew Honan wrote a great piece about being a location-aware guinea pig:

Millions of people are now walking around with a gizmo in their pocket that not only knows where they are but also plugs into the Internet to share that info, merge it with online databases, and find out what—and who—is in the immediate vicinity. That old saw about how someday you’ll walk past a Starbucks and your phone will receive a digital coupon for half off on a Frappuccino? Yeah, that can happen now.

We’ll be seeing a lot more articles like this soon, moving to more mainstream press. Sharing location enables a whole bunch of cool tools that we don’t even know about. Still, people will be appropriately skeptical. To many it will feel like a giant invasion of privacy, even if they grant permission.