“Some People Don’t Have Maps”!? We have Google Maps!

Last Friday, I attended the Google Geo Developer Workshop at UC Berkeley. Pamela Fox and Mano Marks from Google gave an informative session on Geo API and KLM in Google Earth.

Google Earth has made a revolutionary impact on the way we perceive and imagine the universe. However, as one of the few standalone Desktop applications provided by Google, I always thought that the fact that Google Earth has to be downloaded to run makes this application less attractive and it doesn’t align with other web apps. Mano Marks presented what Google Earth can do with KML (Keyhole Markup Language). Because it’s XML-based, I see it as a great way for information exchange with other Google products. On a side note, Mano mentioned that Google generates revenue indirectly from free applications like Google Earth. Google’s mission has always been indexing the universe’s information. The more information people can search through Google, and higher the exposure the ads become.

As a “web guy,” I am fascinated by the Geo API. I became even more excited when Pamela showed an example of extracting data from a Google Spreadsheet and placing corresponding markers on the map. Using Google Spreadsheet as the web database is a revolutionary idea. Because of the established way of using spreadsheets, in many cases, Google Spreadsheet can replace SQL databases, or even content management systems.

During the workshop, I randomly created a employee-address record book, published via Google Spreadsheet, and generated this map:

The highlights of this example:

1) The Spreadsheet can be updated by authorized users. Authorized users just need to log on to spreadsheets.google.com and update the spreadsheet; the spreadsheet will be published as a JSON object.
2) The Map, which reads data from the JSON object, will then be automatically updated
3) The JavaScript code is light-weighted and easy to be tailored

(Paul Irish suggested that I could use Google Map to create a carpool list so that Molecular employees in Boston can come to work with other employees who live within a certain distance. To achieve this, we can modify the above map by drawing a 5-mile-long “GPolygon” at each employee’s location and detect other employees who are within the polygon. There are many other ways to create this kind of carpool list. Nested for-loops that run through the marker array, for example, can also do the job.)

At the end of the event, I talked to Raymond Yee, Lecturer at UC Berkeley and author of Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. On May 12, he will be hosting the “Mixing and Remixing Information” Open House at UC Berkeley. It will be interesting to see students’ projects on mashups. His book is also worth mentioning, for it’s going to be released under a Creative Commons License. Writing books on the latest web technology is a big business, and I admire Yee for his unselfishness in sharing his work with us for free.

In terms of upcoming events, Pamela mentioned during our conversation that she will be going to Boston (MIT) for another workshop. Folks in Boston: bring your data and code with her!