Map Your Corporate Neighbors with Google Maps

Google Maps showing lists of business that occupy a given address

Yelp’s First 90 Top-Rated Restaurants in San Francisco

Just for the fun of playing around with Click2Map’s map creation features, I slurped in the first 90 top-rated restaurants in San Francisco, laid it down on an excel sheet, converted it into .csv, and fed it to the Click2Map’s import tool that automatically generated the 90 markers on the map.

Update: Geode Location Determination Coming to Firefox - All Points Blog

Adena at Directions Magazine shared the Mozilla announcement that Geode is coming. Geode is a geolocation add-on for Firefox which will enable localized content. ReadWriteWeb describes it as a tool that “understands location, enabling enriched, personalized, and localized content” and VentureBeat explains it’s a location determination tool, built on the W3C spec, upon which developers can build.

Over 300 iPhone Apps Use Location Look-Ups

According to Skyhook Wireless over 300 iPhone apps are location-aware as of October 3rd. According to Mobclix there are over 4,000 apps in circulation. If these numbers are correct this puts the location-aware percentage at under 10% — far, far less than I would have suspected based on my own experience. There were 5.5 location-aware apps released per day in September. The location-aware apps 61% are paid (less than the 76% found in iPhone apps as a whole according to Mobclix).

Where in the world is …

This month we’ve published a significant amount of new or updated high resolution satellite imagery for Google Earth. So if you think it is going to be easy to find the new imagery, stop and think again. You are going to have to work a little. We have put together a list of clues about where to find some of our new imagery. Here is one to get you off and running on your Google Earth tour

Google Maps and other Google Apps vulnerable to attack

“The beauty of frame injection attacks is that the attacker is able to impersonate a trusted entity without needing to bypass XSS/HTML filters or even break into the target server,” Pastor explained on the GNUCitizen site.

Problems Continue With Google Local Business Listings

A clear explanation of Google Maps recent hijacks in business listings

We wrote a few weeks ago about the opportunities/threats of building a business on top of Google Maps. The “mainstreamization” of maps shouldn’t even be argued anymore, but the technology isn’t at the top of its performance, and here are a few reasons why:

1. Submitting local listings: Anarchic vs Tyrannic.
In an interview of Frazier Miller and Shailesh Bhat from Yahoo! Local conducted by Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and found through Mike Bluemthals’ blog), the two managers explain their company’s approach for maps and local ads.

For professional map creators, the process of submitting geo-defined listings to mapping providers is long and uncertain. While Google is still a little loose on the control it handles over user-submitted data, we can see in the interview that Yahoo has set strict control rules to extract and exploit only quality data.

In the case of Google Local, you can’t be sure that some witty SEO brains won’t push their business in pole position on a category that they could not even be related to. In the case of Yahoo!, this is the opposite approach: Most of the information is manually scrutinized (urls, geocode, user-generated changes). “They do geo-code verification so a listing will be rejected if the address doesn’t code to an actual location”: That’s a tough one, because we’ve all experienced several time submitting an address, and getting an error message, whereas you are pretty sure that the address is correct. Your whole listing is at stake with Yahoo!

In both cases, submitting listings to maps providers is not a crystal-clear operation, and at the end of the day, you may be very disappointed with the way your markers rank and perform on a map.

2. Mapping is an art, not an exact science
Back in April, Chris Silver Smith wrote an excellent article on Search Engine Lands, Top Causes of Errors In Online Maps. He explains that mapping errors - like getting a location point on the wrong side of the road - are pretty common for multiple reasons:

“The vector shape files break curved lines down into straight line segments, and there are cases where the straight line approximation of curved features can make locations get pinpointed erroneously.”

“online mapping systems often interpolate (distribute evenly) addresses along each side of a street when, in fact, business addresses may all be clumped up at one end of the street.”

“When online mapping systems do not know the correct location for an address, they often will still generate a map for the user, making a map pinpoint default to the center of a ZIP code area, or default to the centroid of a city.”

There are seven more error reasons on Chris Silver Smith’s post, so I recommend reading it. This shows that computers can’t always provide an exact and reliable result for maps, which is embarrassing when the purpose of mapping technologies is to point to an exact place in space.

3. Crowded maps
That’s the downside for map consumers: Crowded maps. Sometimes, there are so many markers on a map that the laser-focused precision of maps gets distilled in a sea of markers. This automatically drives visitors away from a page. Crowded maps are a no-no. This recent discussion on Google Groups confirms this statement. A massive number of markers can also slow your browser down.

A solution for this problem has yet to be figured out. There are numerous map-based local merchants search engines that constitute great sources of information, but the vision of hundreds of markers all overlapping each other on a map just drives visitors away. Tackling this problem could mean enhancing the performance, ie the business, of such service providers.

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