Blog - MapMyGlobe

For a while I’ve been wondering which one (if any) of these terms is proper english. The first two ones appeal to French speakers like I am (the French word being “Géolocalisation”), but it turns out they’re as far from Shakespeare’s language as it could get. On the other hand, the third one, Geolocation, is designated by Google, and therefore by the Wisdom of the Crowds, as the proper one

Here at MapMyGlobe, we use a tiny bit of IP geolocation (or more accurately, we’ll use it in the next release) to position a pin for the user when he creates his own profile page.

IP Geolocation is also a very important piece of my other project, MapMySearch, a mashup that enables you to locate on a map, the servers hosting the top results of your search in Google.

MapMyGlobe’s code is undergoing a lot of work these days. I will tell you more about it in the coming days, as I roll out the new functionalities and improvements. But what I can tell you now, is that I am feeling that I know very precisely what I need to change to make the app more efficient, more robust, and above all, simpler.

Stay tuned!

As a follow-up to the previous post, I felt the need for an overview of Collaborative Mapping applications, how they differ from MapMyGlobe, and why MapMyGlobe is better

A first category is made of apps whose goal is to collaboratively make map tiles, as opposed to annotating existing ones. This category contains some really cool projects, the most prominent being OpenStreetMap. These projects are very promising and sooner or later their data will be more accurate than traditional (non-User-Generated), commercial map tiles, and their API will be a huge competitor to Google and Live Maps. However as I said, we at MapMyGlobe are focusing on annotating current map tiles.

A second category of apps regroups projects that are technically very close of what MapMyGlobe does, but that can just not be called collaborative apps: in those apps, an individual creates a private map by annotating a provider’s map tiles, and either sends it to his friends, or makes it public, but viewers don’t have the ability to edit it. In this category are initiatives such as Wayfaring, and of course Google’s My Maps.

The third category is a subtle variant of the second one, where mappers don’t really add their own content to the maps, but rather link to other data sources. Contrary to the second category, most of these apps can be called collaborative, because everybody can usually add data from the data sources. Examples of such mashups include Panoramio, a Spanish app that enables pinning pictures on a map, and that was recently bought by Google, or GeoNames, which allows users to pin Wikipedia articles on the map.

The fourth category differs from the third by the fact that the app has its own content, i.e. it’s not a mashup anymore. MapMyGlobe is in this last category. Everybody can edit the content that’s really the app’s content, not content from a third party. The project that would be most closely related to that, especially on the technical side, would be WikiMapia. However MapMyGlobe differs from WikiMapia by two things: first, while WikiMapia is an attempt at a very generalistic description of the world - which is essentially, placenaming -, MapMyGlobe has a precise purpose: being an virtual travel guide. Second, WikiMapia’s places’ descriptions are static in the sense that some textual content is attached to a particular location. However, MapMyGlobe aims at providing a more interactive way to visit places, thanks to user-defined animations and graphics.

In conclusion, I believe there’s more and more space in today’s internet for collaborative mapping apps, and I hope MapMyGlobe will be a part of this collaborative revolution

The title of this post is a reference to Ward Cunningham’s original description of the wiki as “the simplest online database that could possibly work“. While in theory, you could build an online database by just opening a web interface to your data, this approach just wouldn’t work without basic functionalities such as easy editing - the fact that you can type into a browser form instead of a database field -, open structure - the ability to edit the pages’ organization in addition to the pages’ data -, and most importantly, version control - the fact that all changes or deletions are kept track of and can be reversed in a matter of seconds.

In addition to these basic functions, Collaborative Mapping implies the ability to easily edit graphical stuff: either the map tiles themselves (but that’s a different approach), or, in our case, the map’s overlays. Thus the design problem facing us is to build an application that verifies each of the three properties stated above. In addition to some technical and practical problems - for instance, how do you build an interface to easily edit a polygon? - a few theoretical problems arise as well - for example, what does revision control mean when you’re dealing with sets of points?. The same kind of issues arise with the way frames and pages are organized. The goal is to find an expressive, yet simple solution to these problems. Yesterday I pushed production code’s iteration #2 which corrects a few bugs, and is a step further in that direction. Hope you like it