Mapping everything
Driving home from the City today, I sketched out a concept for a flash app that would tap the Flickr API to infer location from Flickr tags. A quick glance on the FlickrIdeas discussion board pointed me at this site: Mappr!, which does exactly what I had in mind. It’s just gone live, so it’s a bit limited still, but it’s damn cool. I pointed the system at my photos and it guessed many of the right locations. It did guess several locations errantly, though–it assumed that a tag for Washington meant Washington D.C. That’s kind of weak, but the other funny one was event funnier. Mappr’s interpretation of a tag for “Lynn”, a friend of mine, was “Lynn, Massachussetts”! So they’re going to have to iron out the wrinkles.
Still, it’s just another example of the amazing grass-roots activity on the web.
Sites like Mappr (or Google, or Amazon) make their API’s open and creative folk find brilliant ways to re-use their functionality or data. They build these tools for non-commercials purposes (they oten have to by the terms of the API agreements), with the only goal to advance the state of the art. It’s an invigorating time!