Platial Google map mashup
Tim Finin, 1:00pm 10 April 2006Platial is a new Google map mashup that I heard about on NPR a few days ago. It allows people “to find, create and use meaningful maps of Places that matter to them.” This is from a recent Wired article:
Map Mashups Get Personal
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Platial provides a home for people who love quirky geographical information or just want to mark the locations that have meaning to them. Sign up for a free account, and you can start building and sharing personalized maps, complete with place markers, tags and descriptions of each spot. Collaborate on them with your buddies, or keep them to yourself.
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You might say Platial is a cross between MapQuest and LiveJournal. Built on the open interfaces for Google Maps, the 2-month-old site is one of a new breed of map mashups — web applications created by mixing an already-existing open mapping platform with original software. Platial co-creator Di-Ann Eisnor says she built Platial for what she calls “neogeographers,” who use digital maps to tell stories and chart eccentric routes through familiar terrain. “Users tend to start out by making maps of where they’ve lived or traveled, and then they become tour guides for their neighborhoods,” she says. “Later, they might become what I call ‘collectors’ — they tag all slow-food restaurants and organic farms, or they chart the locations of independent bookstores.”
Platial is a typical 2.0 application and is pretty easy to use. I found some functional problems and it can be a bit slow, but I am sure they will get the kinks out as they mature. To check it out, I created a map of places near UMBC and invite others to add interesting or useful places to it. Platial supports a kind of localized search — here’s the result of searching for ‘university’ in ‘Baltimore’. You can also tag places and search by tags, like this map showing places tagged with ‘museum’. It even has rudimentary social networking/blogging features.
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