Microsoft is announcing two new features to Bing Maps today - an integration with Oodle to show rental property listings and another integration with Foursquare to visualize check-ins, tips and a variety of other data.
Although the two seem only related by the map visualization aspect, they might be useful hand in hand to find that new apartment that's close to where everything (or nothing) is going on.
You may or may not be excited by the acronyms OAuth and IMAP/SMTP, but the combination of them all together is very exciting news. Google Code Labs announced this afternoon that it has just enabled 3rd party developers to securely access the contents of your email without ever asking you for your password. If you're logged in to Gmail, you can give those apps permission with as little as one click.
What does that mean? It means mashups based on the actual emails in your inbox. If you've given a 3rd party app secure access to your Twitter account, then you'll be familiar with the user experience. The first example out of the gate is a company called Syphir, which lets you apply all kinds of complex rules to your incoming mail and then lets you get iPhone push notification for your smartly filtered mail. Backup service Backupify will announce tomorrow morning that it is leveraging the new technology to back up your Gmail account, as well.
What would you do if you heard a giant boom and you didn't know where it came from? If you're like thousands of people in Portland, Oregon, you might hit Twitter and Google Maps to participate in the city-wide exploration of a slightly frightening mystery. Last night at about 8 p.m., people in a big part of the city felt their windows shake and no one could tell them what caused it.
Was it a sonic boom? An angry deity? Even the mayor himself tweeted this morning that he was looking into the sound. In the meantime, thousands of people were using the hashtag #pdxboom and adding themselves to a hastily configured Google Map showing where they lived and how loud the boom had been there. In just a few hours, a pattern emerged, with reports clustering around one city park. This morning the police found a detonated pipe bomb there and cited the Google Map in their announcement.
We've seen the feature before on services like MapMyRide and surely many other maps, but as of yesterday, we will probably begin seeing it pop up all around the web - elevation on maps.
Google announced yesterday that it would be bringing elevation to its Maps API, ensuring a whole new slew of Google Maps mashups.
Have you ever found yourself wondering why your friend hasn't called - even though they promised - only to realize you've been sitting in the cellular equivalent of the Dead Sea for the past hour and a half? Sometimes, it just happens that the spot you decided to wait out an important call had no coverage and now, you could know that beforehand. Even better, you can look at your city's coverage before you even choose a wireless service in the first place.
Root Wireless today released its Root Mobile crowd-sourcing app for Blackberry and Android phones, which pulls data from phones and aggregates it into a street-level coverage map.
Every age brings new wars, and every war brings public expressions of collective grief and respect for the dead. My parents' generation had the Vietnam Memorial, and their parents' generation now have the National World War II Memorial. Our generation has fought a very different, very difficult war in the Middle East over the past eight years; as of today, one memorial offers perhaps the most comprehensive and deeply detailed picture of the human cost to date.
A new app, Map the Fallen, gathers and aggregates information on war casualties in the Middle East from U.S. and coalition nations, giving dead servicemembers' names, ages, pictures, hometowns, places of death, and the cause or incident of death.
The long awaited catalog of public data from the US government launched this morning at Data.gov. Developers, watchdogs and data nerds around the world rejoiced - but the initial offering is a bit of a let down.
New federal CIO Vivek Kundra is in charge of the site, which will act as a central repository for government data, including XML, CSV, KML files and more. At launch a mere 47 data sets are included and they appear to lean towards the least controversial matters. None the less, it's exciting to see the effort happening. Hopefully some awesome mashups are on the way!
Databases. They're not just for those with specialized skills anymore. Want to know what kinds of insights into the world everyday people can find when the right tools are available to process plenty of data? Check out this example below.
One year ago we wrote about a fascinating service called PolicyMap, a website where users can view more than 4000 different data sets laid out on a map down to the city street level. I found which parts of my neighborhood donated more money to John McCain than to Barack Obama, and vice versa. Today PolicyMap launched a new feature for subscribers that allows up to three points of data to be cross-referenced. You may or may not be interested in subscribing to PolicyMap, but anyone can see from the screencast below just how much potential technologies like this have.
Today is an important day in the history of politics and technology - the US Senate voting record is finally available in machine-readable XML (extensible markup language) format. Mashups, vote tracking and comparison applications, will now be welcomed in the front door of Congress as first class technologies.
On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.
The Facebook Newsfeed: so much juicy information, so little access to it. Last week we wrote about a new Facebook app that turned your newsfeed into an RSS feed you could subscribe to outside of Facebook. It was really useful and now it's gone.
Even the app's developer agrees that the app crossed the line, overstepping Facebook's much celebrated privacy controls. We're still disappointed though, and we wish that this rich source of data could be opened up for developers and users to build value on top of. What kind of publishing system doesn't offer an RSS feed? A fundamentally closed one.
