The Google Maps of the Week

This week I was very impressed with Here Comes the Sun, an application that uses CSS filters to jazz up Google Maps Street View.

The application does a little processing of Street View in the browser to adjust the brightness of the imagery. Unfortunately because of the differences in modern browsers you will need to use Google Chrome to view Here Comes the Sun.

There is a little Easter egg in the app as well. Click on the 'note' text directly under the Street View to apply another filter to the displayed image.


When giving directions we don't normally just use road names. Instead we say things like, "Turn left at the park, go past the bank and then turn right at the police station".

Landmarkr is a clever driving directions service for the United Arab Emirates that acknowledges the fact that local landmarks are useful when trying to follow a suggested route. Using Landmarkr it is possible to ask for directions between any two points in the country. A suggested route is then displayed on a Google Map and step-by-step directions are outlined in the map sidebar using a mixture of road names and local landmarks.


The Janoskians have taken an interesting approach to organising their current world tour. By creating a heat map of their Twitter followers they have been able to identify the optimal locations for their gigs, based on the number of followers they have on Twitter.

The group asked their fans around the world to Tweet if they wanted The Janoskians to appear at a venue near them. The Tweets subsequently appeared on a Google Map. The band then created a heat map using the Google Maps API to show where there was the most demand.

If you check out the map it appears that the dates organised for the tour so far seem to be hitting the identified hotspots.