What I really do appreciate about Mashups is the speed of development. Very quickly you get from the first thought of an idea or feature to a point, where you can see your first results.
From time to time, mostly motivated while reading a technology post, I can’t avoid to start playing around with this kind of “quick and dirty” development tools by myself.
So, a few months ago I wanted to try the AJAX capabilities of the Google Maps API and started making this little map of the underground stations in Vienna. Basically I just let JavaScript and the API parse an XML file and overlay the result in a Google Map. To decorate the points in the map, I added a photo from Flickr for each station and linked to a Flickr photo search to see more pictures about this station and the area around.
Two days ago I read a post about FlickrStorm, a new Flickr photo search with some “magic” (whatever that means) from a future Google employee. However, reading the post it came to my mind to link my map to FlickrStorm instead of the Flickr search. Unfortunately FlickrStorm doesn’t allow access from outside, meaning that you can’t simply access FlickrStorm by calling the search with an expression like “/?q=searchterm”.
Once the idea of improving my photo search of the underground map in my head, I started trying a few alternative ways – loaded some AJAX libraries, did some testing and finally got a photo search running I’m satisfied with.
Go figure! I really think it’s a nice map add-on.
At least I had my fun hoping from station to station in the map and browsing thru the photos that showed up in the search box. It’s kind of exploring the city by subway on the internet. Flickr has in the meantime become such an amazing photo archive. I even discovered some corners I’ve never seen before around some subway stations, have to open my eyes better next time I pass by…
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