Dave Naffziger's Blog

My latest fascination has been the potential of maps to serve as the primary interface for finding all kinds of information - particularly when coupled with filtered search (ala Kayak or Trulia). Clearly I’m not the only one thinking this, but there are a tremendous number of possibilities that I haven’t found in the various mashups out there. Information ripe for exploring via a map include:

• Movies (theater locations and times)
• Events & calendars
• Post offices & drop boxes
• Gas prices
• Plus of course all of the random things that people find interesting (public toilets, parking garages, potholes, christmas lights etc.) This is particularly interesting, becuase it is too hard for most consumers to code and share their own map. A few solutions have cropped up, but they are still for the technically oriented.

I’ve seen some examples of these ideas layered on top of GoogleMaps, but they still leave a lot to be desired. Google begun building ‘map explorations’ into some of its core search, but I’d argue that they haven’t been that successful with it yet (local and froogle being good examples)?