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Google Maps for Boingo -- And Any Page

Posted by timothy on from the where-you-at dept.

evdo writes "Last Monday, Boingo agreed to send http://wifi-hotspot.wirelessinternetcoverage.com their entire wifi hotspot database. They came through. Since then, the wirelessinternetcoverage.com guys have been working 24/7 to get all the "thousand points of light" in their new Google Maps Hack. It's done. The beta bugs pointed out by Peter Rojas at Engadget are gone. Now, you can bird's eye WarDrive instead of ascii search for the nearest hotspot in a town where none of the streets are familiar." And stockmaster writes "At last week's Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Tim O'Reilly extended his theme that Google Map hacks like Chicago Crime and Craigslist Jobs (which are called "mash-ups") represent a new future where hackers "remix" web services to create new capabilities. This inspired me to create Greasemap, a GPL Firefox plugin that injects a Google map into any page. Notably, it was a 7 hour project which I started when Google released their new API, and demoed the next day on the stage of the conference."

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. I propose... by Otter · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...that people who say "mash-up" be locked in a room with people who say "boxen". And people like Tim O'Reilly who try to extend the term beyond mixing together a drum-n-bass loop and a Jon Stewart clip and pretending you're a real musician should be locked in a cell with people who complain about "hacker" being used inappropriately.

    --
    What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
  2. Re:What is the point of Greasemap? by stockmaster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    As I mentioned below, it's a Greasemonkey script which scans any web page for both addresses and geocode metatags in the GeoURL syntax, and if found, it injects a Google Map showing any/all such locations into the top of the page. You can choose whether it should show the map by default, or just a small bar indicating that addresses were found. My point in making it was to illustrate that the API can be used to add functionality to any site, not just to a particular site.

    I find it useful on sites like whitepages.com, real estate sites, company location "about us" sites, and a bunch of other surprising places. It just makes the whole web more "mappy".

    By the way, the site is back up, so if you got stuck before please try again now at www.vinq.com/greasemap. It's running on a single Xserve; we'll see how it creaks under the strain.