Portwiture helps you visualize your Twitter stream of pithy insights. But not in an old-boring-graph way. Instead, it does it by snagging photos from Flickr, the popular photo sharing site.
[HTML2]Usually when I ask “Can you see what I’m saying?” I’m just mangling the English language. But when it comes to Portwiture—a random Twitter and Flickr mashup from Portland-based designer Tyler Sticka—I’m being all too literal.
Why? Well, Portwiture helps you visualize your Twitter stream of pithy insights. But not in an old-boring-graph way. Instead, it does it by snagging photos from Flickr, the popular photo sharing site. Read More
While mapping services are often one of the first places people start mucking with APIs and mashups, few take to it as well as Portland-based Cartosoft. Continuing to push the mapping mashup envelope, they’ve just announced the latest version of their award-winning flagship product, Mapdango.
From the Mapdango v2 post:
You spoke, emailed, and clicked – and we listened. After some relatively in-depth analysis for usage trends over the last four months or so, we custom-tailored mapdango to provide users with a better experience exploring different locations around the world.
So what’s new?
Well, what’s most important to a mashup? More stuff to mashup, of course. And Mapdango doesn’t disappoint. If it’s got an API available and some GIS info, it’s likely that it’s on Mapdango, now.
The Google Maps based tool now includes travel books from Amazon, news from Google News, weather from WeatherBug, photos from Panoramio, videos from YouTube, articles from Wikipedia, country demographic information from the US Census Bureau, geotagged Flickr photos, events from Eventful, social connections via Google Friend Connect (Mapdango was one of the early beta testers of the Friend Connect service), related news from Digg, links from FriendFeed, and “a whole bunch” of social bookmarking links.
To make things a little easier to digest, the single view map has now been split into three separate views: a dashboard, a map view, and a social view.
What’s more, they’ve added the ability to string queries through a URL, making it easier to bookmark and perform quick lookups:
We have made it even easier to add dynamic location links to mapdango. Simply add a URL-escaped location to the following URL, and mapdango will search for a location: http://www.mapdango.com/location.php?q=. For example, to search for Portland, Oregon, you would create a link to http://www.mapdango.com/location.php?q=Portland+Oregon.
All in all, this feature-rich release marks another leap forward for Mapdango and Cartosoft. And it serves as a positive reminder to the industry that—with the continued proclivity toward open data exchange—individuals hold the power to accumulate and manage tons of data within a single resource.
To try it for yourself, visit Mapdango. For more on the latest release, see the Mapdango v2 release post on the Cartosoft blog.
Mapdango, a slick mapping mashup from Portland-based CartoSoft that has always impressed me, has now impressed a whole heck of a lot more people—including some folks down in Mountain View, CA—by winning the Best Mashup at Mashup Camp.
According to Andres Ferrate, CartoSoft’s Head Honcho and the development power behind Mapdango [Editor: Emphasis is mine]:
There were some great mashups in the contest, including several location-based product availability mashups, some mobile mashups (very cool to think about the emerging possibilities of mashing stuff around for devices), iMovie mashups, a Flickr history mashup, and more. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to see all of the mashups that were competing. Nice to think the little mashup from Portland gave those Silicon Valley mashups a run for the bling bling.
For more on Mapdango and other geospatial magic, visit CartoSoft.
