I saw a preview at OScon, and was pretty impressed. Smugmug has a great app for geolocating your photostream on Google maps. It’s the first photo on map application that I thought was ready for widespread adoption.
Just heard from Don McAskill that the site is open to the public. He wrote:
Thanks again for taking a few minutes to give me your input on our maps interface @ OSCON. Early Tuesday morning we “soft-launched” it, and our customers are having a ball. Technically we’re not announcing it until Friday, but there’s no information embargo or anything. Play with it and tell anyone you’d like.
http://maps.smugmug.com/
Highlights include:
– All smugmug RSS/Atom feeds support geo data, so other apps/services/etc can use this anyway they’d like.
– Google Earth KML is a supported format for all feeds, too, so we can toss photos across the surface of the earth from anywhere on smugmug. Very cool.
– Search for photos by address & various different types of smugmug data. We haven’t blended smugmug’s full-text search with it, yet, but it’s coming. Keyword tags, like del.icio.us, do work, as do others.
– Easy-to-map your photos with interactive Google Maps interface. No need to type Latitude & Longitude directly, and can fine-tune locations on Google Maps.
– We have a “timeline” option which takes the time the photo was taken and creates an animation so we can follow your path as you took your photos on, say, a backpacking trip across Europe or something. Just hit “play” on any of the maps, sit back, and enjoy. Perfect for travellers, which is a big market segment for us.
– Basic documentation and commented Javascript code, since we’re encouraging other sites to do other things with our feeds or mix them with their own data. We’ll continue to enhance and expand the docs to make this easier.