Google Maps + Craig's List – what an awesome integration…
April 10, 2005
Taken from Scoble’s blog, it looks like Paul Rademacher, a tech lead at Dreamworks, has created a very interesting integration of Craig’s List housing posts and Google Maps. I wish I had this tool when I was looking for apartments a few weeks ago.
I’m curious as to how he did this though; I wasn’t aware of a web API available for Google Maps. The features are quite nifty for being a little side project (for example, you’ll notice that you can click on the push pins and see pictures grabbed from Craig’s List). Either way, I hope this is still around – and maybe even improved – by the time I start looking for apartments again in a few months 
April 10, 2005 at 2:14 pm
I’d guess that he’s using this code to use your own XML files by injecting a custom javascript file. I’ve been playing with the code as well, and it works pretty well. A simpler system for making your own maps from data by the same guy is at mygmaps.com.
April 10, 2005 at 8:20 pm
[...] + 租屋資料 integration of Craig’s List housing posts and Google Maps [via plaxoed!] This entry was posted on Monday, April 11th, 2005 at 11:20 am [...]
April 10, 2005 at 9:03 pm
Thanks for pointing out my sites Chris–as it happens, as far as I know, Paul’s not actually using my code in his work.
There is another implementation of similar functionality that does make use of the myGmaps.com standalone viewer service (and includes satellite views):
http://www.indiesoft.com/craigsmaps/
Some additional simple examples:
Two views on one page
Embedding various items in the balloon pop-ups.
Another example
Also, if you’d like another example of scraping live data you could look at this demo of Seattle Live 911 incident data (doesn’t currently refresh though):
Live Seattle 911 incidents
–Phil. (myGmaps.com developer)
April 10, 2005 at 11:38 pm
Phil – Thanks for the links. It is quite interesting how people have hacked together toolkits to access Google Maps. I bet there are tons of sites out there drooling over the user enthusiasm that Google Maps commands