Sunday, November 18, 2012

The Google Maps of the Week


This week my favourite Google Maps all take advantage of the reach of popular social networks. Two of the maps mine users' Facebook accounts, one mapping Facebook events and the other mapping users' friends' travel photos. The third map takes advantage of the micro-blogging platform Twitter to create a near real-time reporting platform.

HUGE city can help you find nearby Facebook events and makes it easier for you to find out what is going on around you. Using the HUGE city Google Map you can search for Facebook events for any location in the world. If you center the map on any location you can view all nearby Facebook events and filter the results by date, by the top rated, the most viewed and even the most attended.

Roam7, on the other hand, lets you view your friends' travel pictures. Connect Roam7 with your Facebook account and you can instantly view all of your friends' travel photos on a handy Google Map. If you click on a photo pinned to the map you can then see your selected friends' photos turned into a travel story. You can browse through all the photos posted from their trip and see where each photo was taken on its own Google Map.


It is still a bit too warm for for there to be any action on the #uksnow Map but it is never too warm for the UKBirdCount Map.

UKBirdMap is a Google Map of bird sightings made on Twitter. That's right - this map shows Tweets about tweets. Twitter messages with the hashtag #ukbirdcount, a postcode (the first part only) and the species of bird spotted are automatically added to the map in real-time.

The results shown on the map can be filtered by date and by bird species so this map has huge potential for bird spotters and for tracking bird populations and migrations. 

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