Flickr Photos In Google Street View

Google Maps has added more user photos to its Street View (above). Now the Yahoo-owned Flickr is joining the Google-owned Panoramio and Picasa photo sites as a supplier of alternative street views. GeoBloggers reported it earlier today and also noted that the photos are available in the Panoramio 3D view (below).

This is significant for two reasons:
1) Flickr has millions of geotagged photos (2.3 million photos with location data were uploaded this month; 95,634,285 in total as this writing). These photos document the earth and with the addition of location metadata they can become useful for more than just photo-lovers. User-generated data and content is being used in significant ways to represent the earth -- especially online. Human contributions show up in base mapping data (in products like Google MapMaker and Open Street Map) and in routing data (in products like Tele Atlas MapShare). This is another proving point in the case for the human built map.

2) The web is a platform and it is great to see excellent, rival services able to work together to build a superior product. I have put out some questions to the Flickr team about how this came about and some of the inner workings of the deal, but I am pretty sure that it would have only been done if the Flickr and Google Maps teams were working together. I am curious if any money was exchanged (none is my guess), how often the Flickr photos get updated, where else these Flickr photos are going to show up in Google's services (Google Goggles perhaps?) and will they show up in new search partner Bing? I am doubly curious if Facebook will ever let its photos be used in a similar way.

We'll be discussing Mapping, Mobile and Local trends with Google and Yahoo! (and others) at Where 2.0. The three day conference runs March 30- April 1 in San Jose. Radar readers can register with this discount code for 25% whr10pcb.

iPhoning His Way To Retirement

My friend Eugene Lin wanted some iPhone App Store money. So he made one iPhone app that was eventually accepted, then another that was rejected and then he found a hit with the racy Peek-a-boo. Along the way he learned the ins and outs of the App Store approva process and made quite a lot of money in Japan.

He shared his findings on this episode of the Ignite Show. Eugene was filmed at Ignite Seattle 8 in the funniest talk of the evening.

Haiti: Tradui, Translation App for Android and (almost) iPhone

Crisis Commons and Crisis Mappers have become major technology and data contributors to the Haiti Relief Effort. Many technologists and geohackers are donating hundreds of hours to common projects. This past weekend saw the release of a mapping app for the iPhone (with expedited App Store approval). Now there is a second app waiting for Apple's app store approval.

Tradui is a free offline dictionary that converts Creole to English and vice-versa. The data came from the HaitiSurf Creole to English Dictionary. It was built by Intridea and came out of Crisis Camp DC. It was released to the Android market on 1/19. It was released the same day to Apple's App store -- hopefully it is approved soon.

I've included screenshots after the jump. Intridea has put the code up on Github.

During any crisis there is a debate about how to coordinate volunteers, manage technology projects and keep data sources clean (for example Boingboing just posted about the redundant people finders that are emerging - via jknauer). That debate found its way to the comments of my Haiti mapping app.

No silver bullet will be found to solve these problems -- especially not immediately following a disaster. When in need people reach for what they have on hand and know. There is criticism that the iPhone is to expensive and not widely deployed enough to be of use. However, it is one of the most powerful mobile platforms out there. Many relief workers will start to carry them (and Android devices) if the right tools are available. Tardui and HaitiGPS are steps in that direction.

Jeffrey Johnson will be speaking about Crisis Mapping Haiti at Where 2.0 in March.

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Our Future World: Freedom (and Daemon)

I just read FreedomTM the second and latest book in the Daniel Suarez's Daemon series. It was a fun, thought-provoking read and I recommend it to any technologist or sci-fi junkie (it would also make a nice Christmas gift for your favorite conspiracy theorist). This review will focus primarily on the technology of FreedomTM, but I recommend that you start with the first book, Daemon.

The Daemon series is an exploration of a could-be-now, constantly connected society. Suarez has taken cutting edge technology and inserted it into everyday life. It's a great exploration of where our society might be headed. In many ways it reminds me Cory Doctorow's excellent Little Brother. Cory's young-adult novel is a great primer for hacker and maker culture. Daemon serves a similar purpose providing a primer for what a networked society that is structured like MMORPG will look like.

The Daemon series is heavy on real world tech (and Suarez has cataloged much of it). After the jump I talk about some of the technology used in the book. Although I will not reveal plot points that aren't on the book cover, these could be viewed as Spoilers. So Reader Be Warned!

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Haiti: OSM and Sat Imagery for Free iPhone App

Update: The iPhone app referenced in this article has since been released on the App Store.

Crisis Mappers from around the world have been working around the clock to create maps and other tools for relief workers in Haiti. The earthquake caused tremendous damage to the road network and updated maps are necessary to enable food and volunteers to traverse the island.

The volunteer-driven Open Street Map project has become a central data source for the Crisis Mappers. It is regarded by many as the most up-to-date map of the area. It combines UN damage assessment, digitized imagery, Public Domain Topos and other base data. In the wake of the tragedy Google quickly released Haiti data gathered from its MapMaker program. DigitalGlobe has made its satellite imagery of Haiti freely available as well (as did GeoEye).

Soon, there will also be a free iPhone app with maps of Haiti coming to the App Store. Jeffrey Johnson worked with a small company, TrailBehind, Inc., to adapt the company's existing ( offline mapping app, Gaia GPS,) to provide offline maps to relief workers. It combines Digital Globe (.5m resolution), GeoEye (.5m resolution updated on 1/13), and OpenStreetMap (constantly being updated).

This version of Gaia GPS is intended to aid disaster relief for the Haitian earthquake. The app can be used to download maps and satellite imagery of the earthquake area, including up-to-date overlays of disaster sites, hospitals, and other relevant waypoints. The map data is provided by Digital Globe, GeoEye, OpenStreetMap, and the maps are hosted by the New York Public Library.

The app also provides other features that might be relevant to disaster relief efforts:

1) Recording of GPS tracks, waypoints, and geo-tagged photos
2) Import/export GPX tracks and photos
3) Guidance to waypoints and along tracks.

For more information about the app, please visit www.gaiagps.com This version of the app is identical to the commercial version, with the exception of the maps provided.

Fingers crossed that this app gets approved by Apple quickly.

Additionally you can see UAV flights from Haiti. These include new to the web imagery from P3 and GlobalHawk.

Jeffrey Johnson will be speaking about Crisis Mapping Haiti at Where 2.0 in March.

Edited for accuracy, clarity and great news about the iPhone app being released.

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Twitter Acquires GeoAPI: Now a Messaging AND Location Platform

Twitter has announced the acquisition of Mixer Labs the creators of GeoAPI. GeoAPI is a location services platform. They have been collecting data (like Flickr, Foursquare, YouTube, Weatherbug and of course Twitter) and made it query-able via their API. For any location you could reverse geocode it and for any place you can get the lat/long. Finally, the cloud service also allowed for applications to create objects and annotations.

Simply put this drives home the importance that Twitter puts on location. The platform team is headed by Ryan Sarver, a recruit from Skyhook Wireless (the company behind your iPhone's wifi location). The company was founded by Xooglers. I am sure that helped.

First and foremost, it will help with Twitter's current GeoTagging API. The new API accepts a location with each tweet. Twitter already has Trending Topics and we've always pictured them having Trending Topics via geography. Now they will be better prepared to add more context with the addition of these other data sources. Twitter will also be gaining a scalable geoplatform to that can support ad hoc queries.

Second, does this herald Twitter's moves into being a location provider? At Sarver's previous company they had a location-brokering service called MyLoki that never gained ubiquity. Twitter has the opportunity to become a major location broker. Twitter currently has a very simple on/off switch for location. To become a full-fledged consumer location service (like Latitude or Fire Eagle) they will need to build in more controls.

Finally, does this herald a new services business model for Twitter? GeoAPI was a cloud service aimed at developers. The business model is to charge per X thousand of queries per day. So far their product pages are still online and they are listed as "All your location needs in one API. A service from Twitter" Twitter charges for access to the firehose and they already have 50,000 applications using their API. Will this become an additional service that those developers can pay for?

This sets us up for a very interesting year in locations services. Google Latitude is due to release a full-fledged API (as opposed to their sneaky one). Facebook may actually wake-up to the potential of location services. I can't picture Apple not wanting to take advantage of all those location-aware iPhones with a new MobileMe service. Will these services work together? Location doesn't have to be zero-sum game and I'll put my money on the players who don't treat it as such.

Playing With Foursquare Data

Foursquare is the new Dodgeball. Which is to say that it is my (and many other people's) method for tracking where we go (and in most cases our social activities). On a daily basis I use the iPhone app to announce some of my whereabouts to friends. I share specifics selectively, but in aggregate my information is shared publicly. (Disclosure: Foursquare is an OATV investment)

Foursquare has a lot of data about me and I willingly give it more most days. Foursquare lets me check-in to a specific location. I earn badges based on where I check-in, how often, and with whom for the various cities I am in. In addition to letting me share my movements with friends I am building up a history of places -- not just points. Foursquare uses OAuth to let me share these places.

WhereDoYouGo is an ITP project that creates a custom-colored heat map of your Foursquare haunts. You can generate maps for any city you've used Foursquare in. It was written in python and runs on Google App Engine. The team also acknowledges the following projects: Mike Knapp's OAuth library, the Google Maps API, the gheat-ae (and gheat) Google Code projects, jQuery, and Blueprint CSS.
(via Gizmodo)

Last Night's Checkins, created by the seemingly ubiquitous Barbarian Group, sends me a mail (almost) every day listing the previous day's venues. I diligently fill in a brief note under each checkin about what I did and mail it back. I never have to visit the site. I love apps that interact with me only as much as necessary (Tripit is another great example of an email using webapp). I had signed up for this as a lark after reading about it on Techcrunch, but now find it to be a useful tool.

Mobzombies is a soon-to-be-released iPhone game (I first played it several years ago on custom hardware) . The game overlays a virtual game level complete with obstacles and zombies to chase you. You can save your character by running around (the game uses the accelerometer to track your movements). The Foursquare tie-in is not intuitive, but is pretty clever. The number of checkins influences the number of zombies spawned -- more friends equals more zombies. Sometimes there are advantages to drinking alone. The app has been submitted to the App Store.

Foursquare isn't just a geo platform. One of the things that sets it apart is its use of game mechanics to incentivize people to keep using it. The more you use it the more badges you get. Soon Foursquare will open their platform and allow custom badges to be created. Until then to get a custom badge you'll have to use Waze, the only external service that has its own Foursquare badge. The pairing makes sense as Waze uses game mechanics to get people to use their GPS program (Radar post).

You can see all of the current Foursquare API apps (like place-ranking site SocialGreat) in their developer portal.

Dennis Crowley, founder of Foursquare and Dodgeball, will be speaking about the use of game mechanics at Where 2.0 this March.

Global Ignite Week: 40+ Ignites Coming Next March

Just over three years ago, Bre Pettis and I threw a geek night in our home town. We called it Ignite Seattle. About 200 people joined us for a hectic night of geek contests, five-minute talks, and beer. I've been hosting them ever since--we just held our 8th Ignite Seattle and had over 700 people in attendance. Since that first amazing night in 2006, Ignite has spread to over 60 cities, bringing together thousands of geeks and generating hundreds of videos of Ignite talks.

This March, it gets much, much bigger. O'Reilly is launching the first-ever Global Ignite Week, to bring together as many local Ignites as possible. As of right now there are almost 40 Ignites scheduled from March 1st through the 4th. The Ignites will span the globe and you'll be able to watch them streaming online every day. So far, Global Ignite Week is represented on 4 continents and 10 countries. Our goal is to have participation from all 7 continents (Nairobi is looking good, and we're working on Antarctica).

I'm happy to say that Bing has stepped up as our first sponsor, helping us make Global Ignite Week possible.

If you'd like to be apart of Global Ignite Week (either by throwing an event or as a sponsor) contact us via Ignite@oreilly.com. Here are the participating cities (so far).

Ann Arbor, MI
Atlanta, GA
Auckland, NZ
Austin, TX
Baltimore, MD
Bangalore, India
Bay Area, CA
Boston, MA
Boulder, CO
Brussels, Belgium
Cardiff, UK
Columbus, OH
Denver, CO
Fort Collins, CO
Lansing, MI
London, UK
Los Angeles, CA
Lisbon, Portugal
Madrid, Spain
Missoula, MT
Montreal, Canada
Nashville, TN
New Haven, CT
New York, NY
Paris, France
Philadelphia, PA
Portland, OR
Pune, India
Raleigh, NC
Salt Lake, UT
San Diego, CA
Sault Ste. Marie, Canada
Seattle, WA
Sebastopol, CA
Sydney, Australia
Toronto, Canada
Waterloo, Canada
502/Louisville, KY

Visualizing and Categorizing the 911 Wikileaks Data Set

On November 25th, Wikileaks released 500,000 text pager intercepts from the 24 hours surrounding the horrific 9/11 attacks. The personal, corporate and governmental come from the Washington D.C. and New York City areas. These can be found on their own subdomain at http://911.wikileaks.org/ and are released under the CC-BY-SA license.

As with the AOL search logs and the Enron email archives this data set will be examined and visualized. I am sure that the hope will be to gain an understanding of the thoughts and feelings of the people on the ground. Two applications have already been created.

911pagers is a site devoted to searching and community annotations of the corpus. You can see the theoretical communications with Guiliani (New York's Mayor at the time), random messages or the recommended . Built on Google Appengine, 911pagers will add ratings, timelines and keywords. You can track their progress via @911pagers.

The second project is an analysis of the frequency of 100 phrases such "flights cancelled" and "call home". Jeff Clark selected only the content from 8AM to 8PM on 9/11. He created a set of timeline graphs for each phrase (above). After the jump I've embedded a timeseries video of these phrases.

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GWT Now With SpeedTracer

Google is releasing v2 of GWT (pronounced "Gwit") tonight at a Campfire One in Mountain View. The open-source Google Web Toolkit enables developers to code Ajax web apps in Java. This latest release is focused on speed (just like the latest iPhone) and improved dev-designer collaboration.

I was on a call with Bruce Johnson and Andy Bowers to learn more about the release. There are three new major features being released tonight.

Of the three SpeedTracer (screenshot above) seems to have the greatest implications. It is a separate application that allows developers to watch "where time goes" as a page is being loaded. The example Johnson gave was a recent re-write of the AdWords Campaign Manager. There's a 100-row table that is a part of the application. In the first iteration the table took several seconds to load. Using SpeedTracer they realized that the order of the UI statements was delaying DOM translation. They changed a few lines and the table loadtime dropped to half a second.

SpeedTracer only works with Chrome. Google is making a play for the developer. And by focusing on developer tools they are likely to succeed. The speed improvements should translate to other browsers and in reality they have to. Focusing on speed improvements for a currently-minority browser would not win over many devs.

Code Splitting, the second feature, is a way of segmenting out non-essential portions of an Ajax app for future, as-needed download. The example given was that for a mail app you don't always need to be able to write or the settings tab. You could download the code for those functions on demand. Wave apparently uses this functionality to keep their loadtimes down.

Finally, UIBinder is aimed at improving developer-designer workflow. It allows designers to hand over HTML elements in an XML Template. They can also use GWT Widget library for certain elements. Developers can easily plug their application into this XML presentation layer. This is a far cry from being able to use Photoshop mockups to generate code ala Flash Catalyst, but if the design department knows HTML it should be very handy.

GWT is increasingly being used on Google's own applications. It was quite famously used to make Wave. It is also used on the revamped Orkut (I hadn't been there in over a year, it has had quite a makeover), AdWords, Google Squared (labs), Google Profiles, and Moderator (20% project). DoubleClick is being converted to GWT and a lot of Google's internal infrastructure is built using it. Quite notably some of Google's mobile app have been built with it: Mobile Maps and Latitude for the iPhone. It's great to see Google putting it's money where it's mouth is (quite literally with AdWords), but I really wonder if we'll ever see GMail powered by GWT.

In the future I'd be surprised if there wasn't increased support for HTML5 elements such as Canvas. I also expect that they'll add explicit support for mobile app. Of course, using GWT doesn't block a developer from using non-GWT functionality, but having explicit support always helps.

Recent Posts

• Ignite Seattle on 12/1 (tomorrow): iPhone Apps, Ben Franklin and Rubik's Cube on November 30, 2009
• Tonight: Radar/Ignite/Laughing Squid Meetup in Philadelphia on November 23, 2009
• Ignite NYC on 11/16: Gov 2.0, Body Hacks, and Hi-Tech Craft on November 15, 2009
• Ignite Show: Andrew Hyde on The Posting Economy on October 30, 2009
• Navigating the Future: Take Me to Bob on October 29, 2009
• Online Where 2.0: iPhone Sensors for Developers on October 28, 2009
• Google Shrinks Another Market With Free Turn-By-Turn Navigation on October 28, 2009
• Max For Live: Making Musicians Into Programmers on October 26, 2009
• Ignite Show: Kathy Sierra on Feeling Better is Better on October 17, 2009
• Random Hacks of Kindness: Disaster Relief Codejam on October 15, 2009