The thing about useful stuff is

London tube unearthed Friday, January 09, 2009

A London Underground 1995 Stock train pulls in...

Image via WikipediaDescribing itself as the tube travellers bible, I stumbled across Metazone's London tube site last night by accident whilst looking to find the nearest tube to a meeting venue.

In one part of the site, they've overlaid the tube lines on a google map which highlights the astonishing meandering routes some of these lines follow, but more practically as you mouse over the map useful tube information is revealed.

You can check it out here.

Labels: Google, Google Map, Google Maps, mashup

posted by John Wilson @ 8:40 AM Permanent Link ,

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LondonTown looks slick. Saturday, September 22, 2007

I'm with Steve on this, who spotted it. It is an excellent map mashup from LondonTown.com with overlays of hotels, events, restaurants, tube lines and parking.

Great example to try is the hotel availability and rates on the map, with is visually great. It stands out by virtue of not using google maps but a map from a source I don't recognise. It certainly has been upgraded since I saw it last year.

It's just a shame it only covers central London.

Labels: mashup

posted by John Wilson @ 11:40 PM Permanent Link ,

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Gruvr has hit the groove Friday, September 21, 2007

Gruvr is a cool mashup of google maps and live event/show information.

You can specify a location and a radius to see details of upcoming shows, as well as looking for gigs involving specific bands. The app appears to make use of the Eventful API.

The map pans around the around highlighting events, with varying degrees of location accuracy and perhaps a little too fast, but fortunately there is a table of events.

There's also a hatful of widgets you can use and the integration with MySpace is a key element.

The only bizarre thing is that the site contains no details of who is behind the site and how to team up with them - if anyone knows please get in touch with me as I'd love to chat with them.

Labels: bands, gruvr, live events, mashup

posted by John Wilson @ 9:29 PM Permanent Link ,

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London Bridge is being knocked down Wednesday, May 23, 2007

It's not really, but I read about an excellent google maps mashup today which crawls over UK local authority websites for planning applications and then mashes the results up on a google map.

In beta at present, PlanningAlerts is an excellent idea that allows you to specify an area that you'd like to monitor and then notifies you by email as and when it discovers relevant planning applications in that area. 150 authorities are covered at time of writing (sadly my own isn't yet).

So you'd find out if a planning application was submitted to knock London Bridge down. As soon as I read about the site, I thought of MySociety, and sure enough they are hosting the site.

Google Maps Mania is an excellent source of news on interesting google maps mashups - it amazes me how many inventive applications people have come up with involving location based information.

Labels: Google, maps, mashup, mysociety

posted by John Wilson @ 7:00 AM Permanent Link ,

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Teqlo - a mashup platform for the masses? Monday, February 19, 2007

Dennis Howlett has blogged on several occasion about Teqlo but its' only recently that they have opened the beta to the general public. I confess that in the absence of trying the service it was hard to understand what the fuss was about, particularly since the site home page gave almost no info away.

So having finally been able to sign up, I confess that I can see why Dennis was getting excited, albeit there is clearly some way for the service to go.

Their intro video is here, which follows the style of the increasingly infamous web2.0 video.

Teqlo provides a platform within which non-programmers can join "widgets" together to create personalised applications. Whilst this initially appears daunting, Teqlo has provided a couple of pre-configured apps to start you off. One is a simple "lead & call" app which allows you to record to-do's that are automatically added into your google calendar; the second returns results from a search of your LinkedIn account with a google map of the contacts that you select from those results.

It took some "fiddling" to get the hang of modifying the examples, but it was quickly evident how immensely powerful this environment is, far more so than the current incarnation of Yahoo Pipes. I'm intending to continue to play with Teqlo because I've hardly scratched the service of what seems possible. As ever, it's always easier to develop an application if you have a real need rather than just dabbling with no purpose. Also the environment is presently constrained by the range of widgets that may be usefully "mashed-up" - some of the google widgets are clearly designed to simply be viewed and no "do'ed". But this inventory will continue grow and I can see Teqlo being an important pioneer in "crossing the chasm" to the mainstream.