Tag: MAPS

Facebook released an update to its iPhone app yesterday, bringing event check-ins and enhanced map functionality. Rather than relying on Facebook Places, users can now check in at events and use Google Maps to visualize where their friends have checked in. And, perhaps best of all, the update allows you to unfriend people directly from your phone. No word yet on when these features will come to ...

Ever wonder how easy it would be for someone to track your every move? You can now find out with a new app called 'Creepy.' Created by 26-year-old Yiannis Kakavas, 'Creepy' is a software package that allows users to pinpoint anyone's location, using geographic data embedded within shared photos. All you have to do is type in a person's Twitter or Flickr username, and hit the 'Geolocate ...

Edmund Helmer used to spend a lot his time on IMDB, where he would look up the exact filming locations of his favorite movies. One day, though, he decided to cut out the middle man, and created his own custom Google Map, showing more geographical movie information than anyone could ever desire. Using Google's Fusion Tables data management tool, Helmer created a map showing the precise set ...

Tonight's First Four games in Dayton, Ohio, will tip off the 2011 NCAA men's basketball tournament. Until then, Google has a remedy for March Madness, offering 3-D virtual tours of the tourney's 14 host arenas. You can get a sneak peek, inside and out, at the places in which all the hoop heartbreak and joy will go down. In addition to the 3-D tours, Google has created a map that pinpoints the ...

Having scoured Twitter for profanities last year, clever cartographer Daniel Huffman has mapped the prevalence of pottymouths across the U.S. The darkest shade of red indicates a citizenry that routinely watches its mouth, while the bright crimson marks a particularly pottymouthed populace. Sure, New York City's scorching scarlet and Oklahoma City's dull red likely won't shock anybody. But Los ...

This holiday season, plenty of people are expected to exchange e-readers, tablets or smartphones. One gadget that probably won't be under the tree, however, is a portable GPS device. According to statistics from the NPD Group, unit sales of portable navigation devices (PNDs) have dropped by 9-percent through the first 11 months of 2010. Sales revenue, meanwhile, has slid by 22-percent since ...

Yesterday, Google unveiled the latest edition of its Google Earth digital atlas, which the company heralds as "the next generation of realism." The new Google Earth 6 sports a more highly integrated Street View feature, which allows users to zoom in from outer space directly to specific street corners or addresses. Taking a virtual stroll around a particular location is also substantially ...

As much as Google has shrunk our world for the better, we fear the all-seeing G might, in the same motion, strip it of the wonders it holds. Then, we see something like this game. Giving you a Street View image, a gridded world map and fifty guesses, it asks you to pinpoint the spot it was taken, and remember the uniqueness of every vista and street corner. ...

For many women, strolling down the streets of Cairo is no walk in the park. Whether it's in the form of catcalls, leers or gropes, sexual harassment has become increasingly common in Egypt, where strict social norms and widespread public negligence have offered little recourse to female victims. A forthcoming site called Harassmap, however, may provide Egypt's women with a new voice -- and, ...

Employees at Longleat Safari Park in Wiltshire, England, started noticing something strange recently. The giant, three-dimensional hedge maze that normally takes 90 minutes of hair-pulling panic to complete was becoming a breeze for many patrons, who were blowing through the attraction in a matter of minutes. Eventually the workers realized that many were ingeniously using their phones to cheat ...

For the third time, Google has managed to misplace the city of Sunrise, Florida, home to 90,000 U.S. citizens and the NHL's Florida Panthers. Despite Sunrise's being a reasonably sizable place with plenty of businesses, the world's most popular search engine can't seem to keep the city in its rightful place: on the east coast of Florida just outside of Fort Lauderdale. For one month this summer, ...

Google has made tracking the upcoming midterm elections a little easier with its 2010 U.S. Election Ratings map. The map breaks down rankings from outlets like Cook, Rothenberg, CQ-Roll Call, and RealClearPolitics (what, no Five Thirty Eight?) for senate, house and governor races in all their color-coded glory. Via the menus on the left, you can select your sources, and the races whose results ...

Eric Fischer has transposed the 2000 Census data to a map, showing the breakdown of race in major U.S. cities. Each dot represents 25 people, divided (as we always seem to be) by color: red for white, blue for black, green for Asian and orange for Hispanic. Check out Fischer's Flickr account for more sociological visualizations. ...

Hip hop historians will be delighted by The Rap Map, an interactive Google Map that plots the geographic origins of rap lyrics -- from NYC and Atlanta to Chicago and LA. From Cam'ron, 'Bout It Bout It,' referencing East Harlem's Taft housing projects: "Then if you walking through Foster and Taft / Flossing that cash then gangstas put the torch to your ass." ...

If It Was My Home brought the tragedy of the BP oil spill to your backyard by laying an outline of the environmental disaster over a Google Map of your own neighborhood. Dimensions, an experiment created in partnership with the BBC, may have been conceived before the debut of the oil spill-specific site, but they use the same trick to put world and historical events into perspective. ...