* Using online tools for managing the offline world
One of the curious aspects of the explosion of tools for managing and using the online world is the parallel explosion of online tools for managing the offline world. It seems that our desire to organize the real world has found its solution online and the Web is the place to do it.
What’s more, the links between the online and the real world are getting richer and deeper every day. Just consider how instant messaging (originally a purely online service) has expanded to encompass cell phones and, in turn, cell phones now handle e-mail, and e-mail updates blogs with pictures of the real world that can be analyzed for faces and tags that cross-reference people who can be notified at their computers or on their cell phones … it is a kind of endless reinforcement process that makes the online and offline worlds more and more a single entity – any ideas what we should call it? Perhaps the Omniverse? I’m sure you can come up with something better …
Anyway, what kicked off that bout of “philosophizin’” was yet another linkage between the online and offline: Google Mapplets, a service launched in April.
Google explains that Mapplets are “are mini-Web pages that are served inside an IFrame within the Google Maps site. You can put anything inside this mini-Web page that you can put into a normal Web page, including HTML, Javascript, and Flash. Google provides a Javascript API that gives the Mapplet access to services such as manipulating the map, fetching remote content, and storing user preferences.”
Mapplets are actually Google Gadgets. This technology is well documented and along with the mapplet developer tools the process of creating and deploying mapplets is fairly easy.
A good example of what can be done with Google Mapplets is the Path Profiler. After you have established a Google login, go to the Mapplet Directory, more than 120 mapplets are available, and click on the “Add” button for the Path Profiler mapplet. Now when you go to your Google Maps page you’ll find an entry for the Path Profiler under the My Maps tab.
Click on the Path Profiler name and you’ll be asked to enter a location. Once found the location will be marked with a cross and you simply click somewhere else on the map and the profiler provides latitude, longitude, and elevation data and draws an elevation profile in the left hand border. Click on the profile image and the current profile image will be redrawn at a larger scale in a popup window.
What is really cool is that when you have several mapplets and you invoke their functions one after another, whatever changes they make in your map are additive. This means that a single map could plot, for example, cheap gas stations, show land contours, and show houses for sale.
I think that this system is brilliant! Moreover, I expect that the Google Mapplets system will drive a wave of geocentric tools that will tie the online and offline worlds even tighter.
