(You will look in detail at the
Google Maps API in various other places, particularly in Chapter 13.)
3. http://www.google.com/apis/maps/
CHAPTER 1 ?– LEARNING FROM SPECIFIC MASHUPS 7
It??™s interesting to go into a bit of history here to understand the emergence of the mashup
phenomenon. When Housingmaps.com first showed up in April 2005, Rademacher was using
Google Maps before it had any real API. He deciphered the original JavaScript of Google Maps
and figured out how to incorporate Google Maps into Housingmaps.com. During the period
between the release of Google Maps on February 8, 2005, and the publication of version 1 of
the Google Maps API (on approximately June 29, 20054), there was a period of intense ???hacking???
of Google Maps, described in the following way by members of the Google Maps team:5
For this and other reasons we were thrilled to see ???hackers??? have a go at Google Maps
almost immediately after we launched the site back in early February. Literally within
days, their blogs described the inner workings of our maps more accurately than our
own design documents did, and soon the most amazing ???hacks??? started to appear: Philip
Lindsay??™s Google Maps ???stand-alone??? mode, Paul Rademacher??™s [Housingmaps.com], and
Chris Smoak??™s Busmonster, to mention a few.
Comparable Mashups
Since the debut of Housingmaps.com, many other mashups??”in fact, tens of thousands??”have
followed this pattern set of recasting data to make geographical location the organizing principle.
Pages:
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73