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Beyond the pin..

The redesigned Google Maps Developers site is a great resource not only for documentation for the now numerous API’s but also a great showcase of how developers have brought mapping to their sites. Of particular interest to me are the case studies from the creative agencies where mapping and in particular Street View has resulted in some really cool sites.. forget pins on a map, how about Zombies outside your house!

The family of API’s have long ago moved beyond fixing pins on the map, complex routing between multiple points can be calculated using the distance matrix web service, visualised using the styled maps API and integrated with location aware applications using the places API.

And despite what you might have heard all this comes free for most sites !

The maps API has come a long way from Housing Maps

Written and submitted from home (51.425N, 0.331W)

2 replies on “Beyond the pin..”

Thanks Ed for this, I was stuck moving from GoogleMaps API v.2 to 3 (Mano Marks encouraged me to on Google+ and Stack Exchange support you moved to helped not @ all)… but the GFT API inspired me to move my data over!
PS: you know that my GFT blog entries are best hits no small thanks to you and @cageyjames

Hi Ed, the showcase looks great. Is it possible to suggest adding a website to it somehow? I believe that how we use Google Maps at Tripomatic.com could be interesting for other developers. We use e.g. distance matrix for calculating the distance between POIs in a city, library RichMarker, Google Places for searching interesting places nearby a selected location or Google Places autocomplete.

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