Archive for the 'Google Maps' Category

In The Lab - Sponsoring Research

Published by astle on April 16, 2008 in Google Maps, partnerships and technical. 1 Comment

Nestorscientists,

After his appearance at AGI2007, Ed was approached by a professor from UCL about sponsoring summer research projects for students from their Master’s program in Geographic Information Science. I went along a few months ago to pitch our project ideas and I am happy to report that one student researcher has taken up our challenge. Christopher Osborne will be working with us this summer to find new and innovative ways to present property-related data to users on a map. Chris comes from a background in online mapping - having built map interfaces for Brent Council and other UCL researchers. He will work primarily on his own, but with ideas, guidance, and data sets provided by Nestoria. We’re pleased to be working with the UK academic community and look forward to seeing what Chris comes up with.

OpenStreetMap version of Nestoria

Published by Ed on January 9, 2008 in Google Maps and technical. 7 Comments

Greetings fellow Nestorhamians!

One of the things users like most about the property search results on Nestoria is the way we use maps. So it’s only natural that since day one we’ve kept a close watch on innovation in the online cartography space. We regularly interview thought leaders and innovators, we’ve sponsored projects like Mapstraction and Living with Dragons, and spoken at the odd industry event. Along the way we were very proud to be cited by Google as the Google maps case study.

Today we’re happy to play a small part in another milestone on the long path of neogeography innovation. Like many folks in the geocommunity we’ve followed OpenStreetMap with interest. Started in 2004, OSM is a volunteer project to map the world. At first glance that might sound absurd, but keep in mind that Wikipedia sounded silly at first as well. Today Wikipedia is used by literally millions of people every day. Similarly, most of the software used to power the internet was created by volunteer driven projects.

Nevertheless, many people are skeptical that this sort of community driven data collection can work, that it can actually create usable data.

Fair enough, seeing is perhaps a steps towards believing. We’ve created a parallel version of our site that uses maps from OpenStreetMap maps rather than the traditional Google maps. Every page on our site can also be viewed in OSM mode, so folks can do a head to head comparison.

Here’s an example, a screenshot of Chelsea with an OpenStreetMap map:

OSM Chelsea

and here’s a screenshot of Chelsea with Google maps:

OSM Chelsea

As you can see the OSM maps in many part of the UK are very good. Have a look for yourself at openstreetmap.nestoria.co.uk, or by simply changing the www in any Nestoria search results page URL to openstreetmap.

OpenStreetMap seems to really be gaining momentum. If you aren’t familiar with the project, please check it out. Recent highlights include the donation of some large geodatasets by commercial organisations and municipalities that realize the community is better placed to maintain the data, and the comprehensive mapping of several large cities. OSM is now used by several universities, including Oxford.

One of the key advantages of OSM is that it’s volunteer driven, meaning maps can be made of anywhere people feel like making maps of. There are many parts of the world professional geodata companies don’t focus on, for understandable financial reasons. As examples, OSM volunteers have recently mapped Stanley in the Falkland Islands, cities in the Philippines, and will be carving up India in February.

One question this experiment will no doubt raise is whether we plan to move away from Google maps. No, we don’t. Google maps are excellent. It’s been especially impressive to see the functionality continue to evolve (and push others in the industry to improve) over the last two years. As believers in the open source movement we wanted simply wanted to create a way to highlight some the amazing progress of the volunteers behind OpenStreetMap.

Some technical details for those interested in how it all works. To be honest it was pretty simple thanks to Mapstraction, and the amazing flexibility of the Google Maps API. Anyone interested in embeddable maps, or even javascript in general should check out Mapstraction. Andrew Turner recently wrote a great tutorial; a good place to start. Also perhaps interesting is our interview with Steve Coast, founder of OpenStreetMap, from last year.

On a final note, this experiment isn’t just limited to the UK, we’ve also created the same OpenStreetMap version of Nestoria in Spain. Just surf to openstreetmap.nestoria.es and let the fun begin. In general Spain is less well mapped, though there are some areas like Sol in central Madrid that are very comprehensive.

Enjoy, and, as with everything we do here at Nestoria, please let us know what you think.

Nestoria data in action - London Profiler

Published by Ed on December 20, 2007 in API, Google Maps and web 2.0. 3 Comments

Dearest Nestors,

Recently Alex Singleton of UCL’s Department of Geography got in touch with us to let us know about an amazing tool they’ve developed: London Profiler.

London Profiler screenshot

The tool is a great example of the advancements in online cartography in the last 2 years. The UCL team has overlayed all sorts of data sets as heat maps on a Google map of London. They’ve integrated the ability to overlay Nestoria KML feeds with all sorts of cool demographic data like educational achievement, and health. The data is incredibly detailed, literally down to the street.

The one that we found most interesting - E-society data that measures how ‘e-literate’ the local population is. Apparently Nestoria headquarters are in an area that is ‘E-marginalised’! We’ll work on improving our computer skills. Meanwhile London Profiler is an interesting tool we recommend any Londoner or anyone interested in cool cartographic data visualisation check out.

Know of other clever uses of Nestoria data? Please let us know.

UKPropertyVision.com - ambient property browsing

Published by Ed on November 26, 2007 in API, Google Maps, fun and web 2.0. 4 Comments

Hello Nestormanos,

We know that many of you are advanced users perched over your keyboards (or iphones) at the bleeding edge of internet innovation. So you no doubt saw the trend over the last few months of ‘vision’ sites - starting with David Troy’s twittervision and flickrvision, and most recently copied by sites like Wikipedia Vision.

Like many of the most beautiful ideas - the concept is very simple. The vision sites hook into the API of the original site and display a continual stream of random data on a map. But the outcome is very powerful. It’s somehow very entertaining and soothing to watch the map glide from point to point in the continual stream of photos and locations.

We were thus delighted to see our own Nestoria API employed to create UK Property Vision. Here’s a screenshot, but to truly experience it you’ll simply have to click.

UKPropertyVision

For you property addicts out there, welcome to paradise. Kick back, grab a glass of something nice, and just let the homes dance across the screen.

No need to worry - here at Nestoria we’ll keep our laser sharp focus on delivering you a relevant results from our comprehensive database of homes. But we know a search engine like Nestoria isn’t the only way people want to look at property. It’s great to see a clever use of the API to present a different interface.

Enjoy!

Support for Google Earth KML Network links

Published by Ed on October 18, 2007 in Google Maps and New Features. 2 Comments

Welcome Nestorooglers!

As we’ve covered before, the pace of innovation in online geography is relentless! Yesterday we witnessed another step forward: our friends at Google now allow dynamic data updates via their maps API. This means it’s very simple to paste a dynamically updating map with property onto any web page.

Never ones to sit on the geodata sidelines, we’ve whipped up support for this in our Nestoria KML feed, as you can see below with this example of homes for sale in Canterbury (note: it will take a few seconds to load). Drag the map and watch properties ‘automagically’ appear.

Very cool, and very easy - the entire code is below, literally 3 lines.

Nice work Google! Keep the innovation coming.

For those of you looking for another alternative to KML you can of course check out our standard Dropin Maps.

Our Google Maps feature wishlist

Published by Ed on August 14, 2007 in Google Maps. 1 Comment

A few months ago we were delighted when Google used Nestoria as the Google Maps API case study. It was a real honour for our little team, especially in the context of how many interesting uses of Google Maps there are (for those that don’t already know of Google Maps Mania, I recommend subscribing. It’s a great blog that regularly features new projects around the world using Google Maps).

Since then we’ve been getting a lot of questions about Google Maps and how we use them on Nestoria. It’s hard to believe that only two and a half years ago Google maps, and the intense innovation it spawned in online cartography, didn’t exist. Amazing how far we’ve come. Still, one of the most common questions we get is “what new features would you like to see from Google maps”? In the hopes that someone out there at Google or in the online geography world is reading this, we’ve posted them.

  1. Make the maps load faster. We work hard to make Nestoria as fast as possible. Unfortunately, the rendering of our results pages always waits on the rendering of the map. That’s a downer. We know what we’re asking is hard. If it were easy everyone would do it.

    This is far and away our most desired ‘feature’. We don’t care what sorts of caching black magic deals with the devil you have to make, do it.

  2. Make maps work in Facebook. Okay, technically this is as much a Facebook request as a Google request, but you’re all there in Silicon Valley. Work it out. Find a way. Let’s all get along and be friends. We want to add maps to the Nestoria Facebook apps.

  3. Integrate Google analytics into Google Maps. We’re data junkies and are big fans of Google Analytics as a way to validate our own bespoke metrics systems. It would be cool to have that type of reporting for maps as well. How are people using the map on our sites? Let us see, please.

Don’t get us wrong, we love all the zooming features, the overlays, the polygons that are continually being added. All great stuff. We love that parts of the map code are now opensourced. But these three features are the ones we want most.

One final note, we want to recognize that Google aren’t the only people innovating. Great stuff recently from the teams at Yahoo!, MSN, multimap, and OpenStreetMap, and we watch them all closely. Very cool that they’ve all risen to the challenge laid down by Google. Internet users everywhere are the better off for it.

What’s your mapping wish list?

Nestoria UK Property Search Google Mapplet

Published by Ed on June 27, 2007 in Google Maps and tools. 1 Comment

Dearest Nestolonians,

As you’ll recall, a few weeks ago we had the honour of being the only start up invited to speak at Google’s London Developer day.

It was at that event that Google announced the beta launch of Google Mapplets, a way for external developers to build a simple tool to allow any user of the Google maps website to overlay datasets onto the map. It’s very similar in concept to the local content (schools, pubs, transport options, etc) that Nestoria users can overlay on the map on a Nestoria property search results page.

We’re pleased to announce that we’ve now rolled out our own Google mapplets (one for the UK and one for Spain). You can add the UK mapplet here, and then use it by surfing to http://maps.google.co.uk/preview.

Here’s a screenshot:

Nestoria mapplet screenshot

Please give it a try, and let us know what you think, either via our feedback form or our Facebook group.

Keep in mind that this is still a beta product that Google is testing, but it’s nevertheless another great example of the impressive innovation going on in online mapping. For Nestoria it’s yet another way to help you find a property to buy or rent as easily as possible.

Sick of mapplets and apps? No worries my friend, we have many other search tools you can use to find your next home.

Good luck!

Nestoria at Google Developer Day London

Published by Ed on June 1, 2007 in Google Maps and about us. 8 Comments

Yesterday was Google Developer Day here in London and around the world, and the team from Nestoria was there.

Big thanks to the kids at Google for hosting a great event, and most of all for inviting Nestoria to speak. It’s a real honor for us, especially given that our site has been online for less than a year.

Here’s a photo of a Nestoria property search results page being featured in the keynote speech by Ed Parsons (incidentally, Ed is an ex-Nestoria interviewee).

Nestoria featured in Google Developer Day keynote speech

Of course the highlight for us was Mike Astle’s (our head of engineering) talk about Nestoria.

Mike Astle at Google Developer Day

We hope everyone was able to benefit from some of the lessons we’ve learned and understand some of the things that make our business a bit more than just plotting pins on a map. There were some great questions afterwards. Thanks to everyone for their interest in what we’re up to. Here are the complete slides of Mike’s talk:

As Mike mentioned in the talk, we’re feedback junkies, so please let us know if you have an comments or questions.

In case you couldn’t make it you can see all the other talks from London and elsewhere aroung the world on YouTube.

Overall the day was a great chance to meet people, learn about some cool new tools, and introduce what we’re doing here at Nestoria to more people. Thanks again to Google for putting on the event.

Even though we’ve seen more and more use of our own property API and tools for webmasters, I’m sorry to say we have no immediate plans yet for Nestoria Developer Day. We do however look forward to seeing many friendly faces from the London, UK, and EU developer community in a few weeks at Yahoo! Hack Day in London.

Mapstraction keeps getting better and better

Published by Ed on May 22, 2007 in Google Maps, partnerships, tools and web 2.0. 3 Comments

As long-term readers of this blog will recall, last summer Nestoria sponsored the initial development of Mapstraction, a javascript library that makes switching mapping providers as easy as possible.

mapstraction

Yesterday the volunteers behind this opensource project announced a major upgrade, including support for six different mapping providers (MultiMap and Map24 are the newest), support for marker filters, many demos, support for GeoRSS, easy integration of geo-referenced images, a new look and feel to the homepage, and more.

Mapstraction has had more and more coverage recently. We’ve had mapstraction code live on Nestoria results pages (for example this search for a two bed flat to rent in Hampstead under 400 per week) for over six months now, and it works very well. It’s a great tool that everyone in the online mapping community should be aware of. Congratulations to all the volunteers who have contributed - this is a big step forward.

So, does this mean we plan on switching away from Google maps? No, Google maps are great. We don’t mind saying how much we like Google’s APIs. To Google’s credit, they haven’t just rested on their lead in this space. Despite great innovation over the last year from other players like Yahoo! Maps and MultiMap, Google have done an excellent job of staying ahead of their competition. The result of all this innovation: more and more features for services like Nestoria and thus for everyone who tries to find a home via our site. We look forward to more new development in this space.

Google Maps support for GeoRSS

Published by Ed on March 23, 2007 in API, Google Maps, tools and web 2.0. 2 Comments

It seems the pace of innovation in the online geo community is showing no signs of slowing down. Yesterday O’Reilly Radar posted that Google Maps now supports GeoRSS.

For those who don’t recall, GeoRSS is a very simple way to add location information to data feeds. Here at Nestoria we’ve supplied users with GeoRSS formatted property feeds since last summer.

So what does all this mean for you, the Nestoria user? Well, no by pasting a Nestoria RSS URL into Google maps you can see the RSS feed on a map. Have a look:

screenshot

Of course, you might say “Ed, if I wanted to see flats to buy on a map, I’d just use Nestoria directly.” I agree that the native Nestoria implementation is a better user experience:

screenshot

Nevertheless, this is still important because it’s a good example of data exchange formats making the merging of different data sets dead simple. More and more, it’s getting easier and easier for the pieces of the internet to talk with each other, and this is just one more example. And like any good discussion, you never know where the conversation will take us. This sort of serendipitous innovation exactly why we invest time and energy in the Nestoria API

As a long time lurker on the GeoRSS mailing lists I can tell you that defining data formats is hard work. Big thanks to all the people out there working hard to get the ‘pesky details’ of the internet to work.

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