Street View Australia is Live

Google Maps StreetView is now available for Most of Australia and Japan!

The quality of the images is impressive and the coverage for Australia is stupidly comprehensive with all major cities are most populated rural areas covered, as indicated by the blue patches in the image below.



Because I can, here's the view from my old commute in to work:

View Larger Map

...and here's one of my favourite places in WA:


View Larger Map

Find Your Way in WA with Google Maps

I hail from the small-town city that is Perth in Western Australia. If you were feeling generous you could say that Perth does not have a reputation as a fast moving, innovative city ready to embrace change. So it's great to see the local government embracing the future, the locals will now be able to schedule trips on the on-time, on-budget Mandurah rail link using Google Transit!


View Larger Map

It's actually really neat and I congratulate Transperth for being the first Australian transit authority to get involved with Google Transit. Nice one!

In related news, you can now add new places to Google Maps for any physical location in Australia (or New Zealand or the US). So if there's a local landmark, or a new business that doesn't appear on a Google map search you can go ahead and add it yourself.



Nice touch, and a good way to ensure visitors can always find a bus to catch to get home from a day's site seeing.

Anyone for Cricket?

Both forms of the World Cup are over and the Northern Winter looms over Great Britain. But for those of us you a little further South, a sensational summer of cricket is just getting started.

Domestic competitions have kicked off in Australia, South Africa, and The West Indies (and starting soon in Pakistan); and one-day and test series are already underway in South Africa, Sri Lanka, India, and Australia. With so much cricket spread so far around the world, what better time to launch a mega cricket maps mashup?

Live Cricket Map
See exactly where every game is being played with links to live ball-by-ball commentary.



Cricket Calendar Map
Shows you all the upcoming cricket fixtures, mapped out around the world.



Cricket Venue Map
Find out more about cricket grounds around the world. These lists are updated and growing every day as we get more details about more grounds around the world. Want to help? Send us the details on a ground near you.



iGoogle Gadgets
All the cricket-map goodness in convenient gadget form. Add the Live Scores Map Gadget and Cricket Schedule Map Gadget to your iGoogle homepage.

Hit for Six was written entirely in the Google Mashup Editor with data coming from Dapper, Google Calendar, and Google Spreadsheets. It makes use of a few cool new GME tricks (like real-time geocoding) so I'll write a follow up post early next week explaining some of the tricks I learned putting it together.

Google Finance Gets More Financials

As of this morning Google Finance is providing price information (including pricing graphs) for stocks listed on the Australian (ASX) and New Zealand (NZX) stock exchanges. Great news for market sleuths in the Great Southern Land (and its neighbor).

This comes a week after Google Finance started providing real-time pricing information on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges in China.

Google Finance still lags a little behind Yahoo Finance, both in terms of global coverage and userbase; but these updates, and a promise of real-time updates on the US exchanges as soon as the SEC gives them a green light, suggest they've not given up the chase.

NBL Ladder Gadget

My infatuation with the Google Mashup Editor continues. This time I've used Dapper to turn the Australian National Basketball League (NBL) standings ladder into an Atom feed, which I'm using to power the NBL Ladder Google homepage gadget.



The GME hosts (and lets you edit) your gadget's XML definition file, and your gadget can feature any of the tags and themes supported by the GME -- so it becomes a 'one stop shop' for creating rich mashup gadgets.

Do Google's Sponsored Links Constitute "Misleading and Deceptive Conduct"?

Australia's competition regulator, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), is taking legal action against Google alleging that they do not adequately distinguish between sponsored and organic search results.

Their case is based on the practise of companies purchasing AdWords for their competitors, in this case 'The Trading Post' purchased sponsored results for two car dealerships in Sydney. The ACCC is also taking action against the Trading Post.

It's an interesting situation, and one that has has come up in the past, with the legalities and merits questioned and discussed at length in the SEO world. While Google has faced legal action in relation to trademark infringement in AdWords advertising in the past, the ACCC claims this is the first ever action looking at the practice from a trade practices perspective. I believe this may also be the first time that 'sponsored links' (as opposed to sidebar ads) have been the specific cause for complaint.

The way sponsored search results are shown was changed recently, Philipp from Google Blogscoped has previously written about the changes.

UPDATE (16/07/2007)
Google responds to the ACCC claims via the Official Google Australia Blog.

"...the ACCC's claims are without merit. Accordingly, we will be vigorously defending against these claims in court."

A Fuel Price Mashup: Web Development Goes Entirely Online

I put this mashup together to play with two new online tools -- the Google Mashup Editor (GME) and Yahoo Pipes. If you're interested in the process (and the effort involved), read-on in part 2 below. If you live in Perth, use the mashup!

Part 1: For Those in WA Who Want Cheap Petrol…

I'm not one for driving 50km out of my way to save 5c/L on petrol, but with unleaded approaching $1.50/L it's probably worth scouting out who's offering it cheapest around where you usually fill up anyway.

Fuel Watch has published fuel prices for years, you've probably seen the updates after the news alerting you to the cheapest petrol 'North of the river' (as though Subiaco was next to Mindarie).



Sign in and create a list of suburbs where you usually 'fillerup', then check which of the stations in your local areas have the best prices on the handy Google Map.

Part 2: ...Piping Chocolate into Your Mashup Peanut Butter

Lunchtime last Monday I got my invite to the Google Mashups Editor (GME) beta (Check out Philipp's introduction), that evening I decided to try it out.

In 48 hours this technology test project completely changed my view of web development. I've written mashups before (Live Cricket, Cricket Venues) but they're pretty basic -- static and read-only, with no personalisation. Worse, each took over a week to finish. This time, before I went to bed on Monday I was done. A couple more hours on Tuesday for the 20% stuff and I'm finished. In less than a day. Done.

The Technology
Overview

Development, debugging, hosting and deployment are done entirely online -- no local environment, editors, or builds. I moved between three different computers during the development and needed only to login to Google and Yahoo to have my development environment ready to go. For me this is a revelation. Gone, the time-wasting installation and configuration of a development environment, no finding, changing, and configuring paths and dependencies.

If you're a coder, chances are you remember the first moment that a change in a line of text affected what happened on the computer in front of you. That shift from passive viewer to active participant is what's driven a lot of us into the world of software development. These tools have given me that same feeling of empowerment over technology for the first time in years.

The Peanut Butter: Google Mashups Editor (GME)

The GME is an online development environment that lets you build Web 2.0 style apps based on RSS feeds. Crucially, it hosts your app and lets you define data structures and hosts read / write data sources on an application wide and a per user basis.

In real-life I'm a C# desktop developer, though I've tinkered in web development and I've used the Google Web Toolkit. The WA Petrol Price Map had a development time, from scratch to working prototype, of about 5 hours, probably a couple more hours for the polish.

A Step-By-Step to Creating a Mashup in GME

(Here’s the source code so you can follow along at home)
Google provide excellent sample projects that you can use as templates. Each editor page is essentially HTML, you use 'tags' to add all the goodies. So I start by laying out my page -- a header and footer, and a table to hold the map and lists.

You use gm:template tags to define data structures and how to display them. You also set the editability (if and how to display the add/edit/delete buttons). So next I create a template for the data to store - a list of suburbs w/ descriptions.

With the data structure defined, I add an instance of this to my UI with a gm:list tag, specifying the template and the data source. In this case I want it stored per user, so I use the ${user} reference. Then I add the petrol price list by adding another gm:list, but this time I don't specify a template, and I point the data source to the address of my RSS feed.

Then I add a gm:map tag for my Google map, and tie its data source directly to the petrol price list data -- ${petrolPriceList}. The map has built in support for goecoded fields, so I just need to specify the feed tags for lat / long.

Now I've got a list of user editable suburbs, a list of the cheapest petrol stations for the suburb selected, and a map of all the stations. The only thing missing is interactivity. GME uses gm:handleEvent tags for this. I tie the map and petrol station lists together by adding a 'select' event handler to both (they share the same data source, a select on one now selects the same item on the other.)

Finally, I make selecting a suburb update the RSS query I use to access the petrol prices. This needs JavaScript, so I add a select handleEvent tag to the suburb list and instruct it to execute a JavaScript function that updates the data source based on my suburb selection.

AND THAT'S IT. Done and dusted. I've seen the future of web development, and this is the way forward.

Some Quick GME Tips & Tricks:

• Use Pipes for RSS feed manipulation, especially anything involving regex. Pipe’s visual interface is a thousand times better than writing JavaScript functions.
• Get usage stats with Google Analytics.
• Make sure users can make some use your mashup without signing in. People are reluctant to sign in without knowing what they're getting first.
• Use a sensible title when you create your new project as that's what will appear in the Google powered login page.
• You can copy a project in its entirety. Useful for using a sample project as a template, or renaming an existing project.
• Host your data in Google Spreadsheets and use the Spreadsheets API for a feed to use in your mashups.
• GME caches requests so you don't hammer your feed providers. This can result in stale data. Add a &frequency= parameter to your feed requests to ensure you get timely data. Concatenate part of the date/time for the update rate you need (Monthly? Daily? Hourly?)
• You can store data either per user (using the ${user} data store) or per application (using ${app}). You can set access levels to application wide stored data to public, read-only, or members’ access only. Create a private mashup for family vacations by adding them all as members and cutting off public access.
• The GME creates a Google Code project for each GME project, including a version controlled SVN repository.
• Use JavaScript for access to the Map functions not exposed in the gm:map tag. (like turning on Traffic View, etc).

…and some existing problems:

• The GME really didn't like either IE6 or IE7. I haven't experimented in FF yet.
• Code formatting was wonky at best, and it was very easy to 'accidentally' delete text by using seemingly innocuous key sequences (shift-home deletes a line!).
• This is definitely still in Beta. The generated code works flawlessly, but the editor itself is buggy as hell (which may be why they recently allowed you to edit offline). Luckily, the team is very receptive to comments and bug reports via the support forums.
• Functionality is lacking, but more (by way of new tags) is on the way. With luck they’ll expand it to provide all the GWT functionality, and eventually make this the backend for Google Page Maker.

The Chocolate: Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes was a revelation. Manipulating feed items to modify and annotate fields, looking up and incorporating information based on feed item fields is the 'hard work' behind much of mashup development -- really any data driven development. Pipes makes this the easy part.

Pipes lets you make any RSS feed your bitch. Join feeds together, kick their contents with a regex boot, annotate them with lookups from other web services (like Google's geocoder), sort, filter, take user inputs -- whatever. This is real power, and it's implemented simply, visually and hosted entirely by Yahoo. No more spending hours writing and hosting a web service that does the same thing, say goodbye caching and bandwidth issues.

Here's how it worked for me.

The FuelWatch feed takes a suburb name as a parameter and returns an RSS feed in the form, [price]: [Station Name] - [Station Address].

Bring on the Pipes. I specify an input parameter (suburb) and join that with the FuelWatch feed address to generate my input feed.

Everything from here-on acts on every item of the feed, so I start by copying the title field into a new address field. Whack it with a regex stick to trim the address from the title field and clean up the address field. The foreach transaction lets me pass this address to the Google Geocoder, adding the result as a 'geocode' section on each feed item. A little more copying and a little more regex -- voila -- I've got glat and glong fields at the root level of my feed, perfect for a mashup.

Check out the completed pipe. Total creation time including registering with Yahoo and figuring out how to use pipes (and re-learning regex)? 2 hours.

Pipe Tips and Tricks

• Use the 'copy' filter to duplicate fields, then you can perform different actions on each copy.
• Use regex to modify each field until it contains exactly what you want.
• The regex control works sequentially, so you can perform multiple changes on the same field one after the other.
• Use the 'foreach' transform to add the results of a web-based lookup based on a field into each feed item (Eg. Add geocoordinates by passing an address to the Google Geocoder. Add photos by passing tags to Flickr).
• Pipes lets you take CSV, RSS, and ATOM data as feed sources, then outputs it as either RSS or JSON.

The Future of Development?

This time last week I'd started a draft on how the move towards Internet applications was raising barriers for entry into the world of software development. On Monday afternoon my perspective changed.

I develop desktop apps in Windows; have done for the last decade. I can see the world moving to web based applications, but before Monday I was staying in the shallows, debating the value of investing the time and infrastructure necessary to develop a real Web 2.0 app.

See, if you want to write a desktop app all you need is a computer and a compiler. Distribution requires little more than an email account. To write a web app (and widgets != applications), you also need a server, database, and bandwidth. Without any server infrastructure, doing things like saving user data is non-trivial. Even if you host it yourself, you need an Internet connection with suitable bandwidth and a 24/7 server. That's a lot of overhead for a curious 12 year old, an experimenting student living on campus, or a consultant developer working on a laptop.

No longer. Google's Mashup Editor provides a framework for developers to define and save 'per user' and 'per application' data structures and hosts whatever application you produce. It is a Good Thing. Used with a data manipulation framework as powerful as Pipes and you don’t need anything but a computer connected to the Internet to develop and deploy a fully interactive web app without even owning a computer, let alone installing a compiler.

Now your development environment moves with you. If you're computer access consists of a computer you share with your family and the workstation at the school library, you can still write fully featured web apps just by logging in.

I'm still only dipping my foot in the deep end of web development, but if Google and Yahoo continue to develop tools like these, it won't be long before anyone with the desire can dive into full scale web development without a second thought.

Update (18/07/07) Read this new article on how to use Pipes to turn this mashup into an even more useful Mapplet.

Google Local Australia Live

Full Australian business listings and driving directions are now available at Google Maps Australia and Google Maps for Mobile.


Google has been steadily adding Australian support to Google maps over the last few months, including satellite imagery, local street maps, geocoding, and as recently as two weeks ago the the Australian domain of Google maps went live.

Google Maps Australia now joins Europe and the US in providing driving directions and local business listings (provided by Truelocal, a local listings provider from News Limited). Apparently this is part of the Google / News Limited deal from last year which saw Google Ads in MySpace.

It's a welcome addition to the Australian local search market that has for years been dominated by Sensis -- the online arm of the formerly government owned telephone monopoly Telstra. Sensis provides both White (personal) and Yellow (business) pages searches, as well as hosting Whereis, the incumbent Australian local mapping service.

Sensis' Whitepages and Yellowpages have always been pretty strong, but Whereis has been stuck somewhere in the Web 1.0 dark ages for a long time, so I expect the growth for Google will begin with maps and develop from there. The current user base for White/Yellow pages searches is still big and loyal enough that it will take some time for Google to start making an impact on local search. But Google's innovations in mobile local search and providing personalised local search should help it win over market share.

Google Announces Mapping Expedition

I think this is the first time Google have announced when and where they're going to be taking high-res photos for Google Maps / Earth Imagery. The 'This Australia Day Put Yourself on the Map' page encourages Sydney-siders to come down to Sydney harbour and make yourself seen by the low-flying Google branded plane. The site even lets you click a map of the harbour to see when the plane is expected in each area.

According to this article from the Sydney Morning Herald, a Google plane will be aloft over Sydney on Australia Day (26 January) to take photos at 4 to 5 times the resolution currently available for Australia – which should make it amongst the highest quality footage available on Google Earth.

Perhaps not coincidently, the Australian domain of Google Maps went live this weekend.

The theory is to take photos of cities during periods when they're at their most impressive – hence Australia Day celebrations in Australia. If it turns out well, expect to see more of the same in other international cities.