Thursday, 3rd November 2005
Yahoo!’s new twist on mapping APIs
One of the most exciting things I’ve seen at Yahoo! since starting here has finally been made public: the new Yahoo Maps. The map application itself differs from many other recent map sites in being rendered entirely in Flash. This leaves far more scope for interface niceties, but doesn’t it reduce the scope for hacking that made things like Google Maps so much fun?
[... 623 words]Local Events Browser. The Yahoo APIs mega mashup.
Super-mashup with Yahoo! APIs: event browser. Chad describes the local browser mashup.
Local Event Browser Demo. Edward Ho on the Local Events Browser, with a neat new use for term extraction.
geobloggers, Yahoo! Maps edition (via) Dan Catt’s geobloggers, now with a Y! Maps Flash interface.
Toolkits for user innovation (via) Jon Udell’s last two paragraphs resonate strongly with me:
Von Hippel advances the notion of user innovation toolkits. The Apache Web server, with its modular architecture, is an example of such a toolkit. In the hands of skilled programmers, Apache can be, and often is, tailored to specific needs. When such customizations are shared, other users benefit. But so do Apache's developers, who, by observing what's done with the toolkit, can more intelligently evolve the core product.
Web-based software delivered as a service is, at its best, another kind of innovation toolkit. Users bring the data; developers wrangle the code; more useful innovation happens faster than it otherwise could.