Mapendar

Who was involved:

• Leonard (Upcoming.org)
• Chris Messina
• David Quiec (Rrove)
• Chris Radcliff (EVDB)
• Amit G (France Telecom)
• Mark Rosetta
• Tantek stopped by to say hello

• Problem
• Tests
• Challenges
• Resources
• Components

• The lifeline/piano roll interface and its behaviors
• Where the feeds come from

Helping you visualize and understand where to be and when... what's going on around you... helping you see the things that have gone on and what will happen... and seeing what your friends are doing.

Not just where I am and where I've been, but who else was there, where were my friends, and what was going on. Photos, events, etc.

Could also be useful for planning your travel, seeing what you've done... also integrate with Eventful's Demand service to request an event.

Presentation

1. What we wanted to do

2. What's wrong with us

3. Where the information comes from

4. What it might look like

5. What we actually accomplished

6. What should be worked on next

Mockups / Screenshots

h2. Info we need

• Where I've been
• Where I'll be
• What is that place? (Rrove)
• Who are my friends/contacts?
• What else is known about them? (Contact info, photos...)
• What might I want to do? What might I want to have done?
• What else is known about what happened/ what's going to happen? (Photos, official site)

• tell me where I'm going to be today
• tell me where I should be in the future
• tell me what I've already planned for the future (flights, hotels...)
• tell me how to optimize my trip(s)
• tell me where my friends were and will be

h2. components

• geocoder
• "geocoder.us":http://geocoder.us/
• "y!geocoder":http://developer.yahoo.com/maps/rest/V1/geocode.html
• mapper
• timeline (piano roll)
• zoomable, with live update of map interface
• playback

• other data streams (photos, videos, tagged data, reviews, people)
• microformats
• hcard
• hreview
• hcalendar
• interface widgets
• time selector (zoom in/out)
• scrolling box
• map (zoom in/out)
• location information box
• invitations
• send to external services (export)
• friend browser
• authorization/authentication
• "OpenID":http://openid.net/
• "sxip":http://www.sxip.org/

• how do you make sense of large volumes of information?
• what do you do when you have spotty/incomplete information?
• many people don't record information that they already know (they'll just remember)... so how you design against incomplete or partial datasets
• how do I control what parts of my information is public?
• how do we display data points that aren't well-defined in space or time? what granularity is necessary in order to display "everything" without displaying a lot of clutter?

Wayfaring, Google Taxi, Zillow, Housing Maps

h2. Inspirations

• Video game interfaces - Civilization, Warcraft, RPG, SimLife, SimCity, Total Annihilation
• Google Finance - zooming in to a day, a month, a year, all time

• The Met - Timeline of Art History
• "Timelines 8000-2000BC":http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/intro/atr/02sm.htm
• Rhyzomatic - find all the bits of information about me from everywhere

h3. Event sites

• "zvents.com":http://zvents.com
• upcoming
• eventful

• google calendar
• yahoo calendar
• 30boxes

• "flagr":http://flagr.com/
• "Socialight":http://socialight.com/
• "Dodgeball":http://www.dodgeball.com/
• "ZoneTag":http://zonetag.research.yahoo.com/zonetag/
• "CheckMates":http://mysql3.inf.dcn.yahoo.com/checkmates/
• BuddyPing
• Plazes
• http://216.218.240.151/~markr/track.html

• "frappr":http://frappr.com
• Plazes / Plazer: information about where I am and where my friends are. Available as a Web application or on the desktop. Also stores information about where I've been.

• platial
• wayfaring
• "tagzania":http://www.tagzania.com/

• technorati
• claimid

• "TripPlanner":http://www.transitinfo.org/tripplanner/
• "iamcaltrain.com":http://www.iamcaltrain.com/
• "google rideshare":http://labs.google.com/rideshare
• "nextmuni":http://nextmuni.com

• mapquest
• google maps
• yahoo maps

• ning
• drupal
• rrove
• yahoo reviews
• wordpress
• GPS (http://216.218.240.151/~markr/track.html)

• Google Maps
• Sparklines - for the histogram/activity graph

activity: something that's going on. could be anything.

h2. Notes

What are we covering today? The timeline/lifeline/pianoroll interface, and where its data comes from.
There's more screen real estate width than height.
The nature of this data is fractal. One source might be an aggregation of other sources, so I might want to expand it to show all of them or contract it to show them all as one. Contracting them becomes an aggregator of its own, e.g. all my photos (from Flickr, iPhoto, Riya).
Same goes for time. A month view compacts into a year view, or expands into a day view. Each one can compact or expand independently.
A third aspect is the histograph, similar to a volume graph on a stock ticker. It shows the total activity by time, so that even a fully compacted view would give a sense of how much data is being hidden in there.
Sweet spot button - find the right balance of time and space to display.
Map spot detail popup may have tabs, for photos, people, video sources, etc.

What are the defaults? Here and now. Your location based on IP or entry, and the current name. Pull in default sources of events, photos, people, locations, news.

Items on this interface should only appear if they have specific date and location associated at the granularity reuired for the map or timeline. That association can be indirect (all the photos for mashpit, even if not geocoded). Specifically, the location has to be geocoded down to the street level. For time, it has to be a specific day at least.

Related pane: for later development. An additional pane with a list of activities that are related to this one (or all these) by something other than time or space.

Feedback mechanisms: use Mapendar to cross-pollinate information between the data sources. For instance, adding Flickr photos to an event, or using the event geolocation to geotag photos for the event, or using the event time to add vCalendar markup to the Flickr description.

Permalinks: click to view this photo on the Mapendar. Links into the Mapendar view of that space and time, potentially with the Photos tab selected.

The Mapendar map and timeline should re-query data based on the window it's currently showing. For space, it searches based on the rectangle you're currently viewing. For time, it searches based on the current selected time at the current resolution and the surrounding dates at a lower resolution.

Exploring the timelines can be infinitely fractal: clicking on a single timeline (friends) would expand it into a set of timelines, one for each person, and collapse the other timelines. clicking on one of the friends' timelines shows that person's whole set of timelines. Same thing would happen for news (expanded by tag) or events (expanded by tag).

Categories: events (what I'm up to), people (friends' stuff), media (what I'm looking at), news (what's in the news)

Demo via Yahoo Maps API:

http://randomfoo.net/mashpit/

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