The web is a platform and it is great to see excellent, rival services able to work together to build a superior product. I have put out some questions to the Flickr team about how this came about and some of the inner workings of the deal, but I am pretty sure that it would have only been done if the Flickr and Google Maps teams were working together.
Pretty interesting that Flickr photos are now shown in Google Maps street view. It is exciting to see and allows the crowd sourced, geo-tagged view of the World to be made available in a rival service.
I've used Street View for planning vacations, remembering places I haven't visited in a while, etc. It's really pretty amazing. But adding user photos really bumps it up a notch from a mechanical, linear set of street pictures to a series of human perspectives. This is a perfect example of why all this social information needs to be connected together. And I'd hate to say it, but Google owning so many services is going to enable them to bring it all together first. Although I'd say they've lagged on that front - there's some really basic integration of their social platforms that they haven't implemented yet.
Speaking of which... I just read that Gmail is adding Twitter/Facebook-like status updates: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/7196085/Gmail-status-updates-to-compete-with-Facebook-and-Twitter.html
Posted by: Chris Millet | 02/09/2010 at 09:44 AM
There's a nice demo of using panoramio photos in Google Maps, using the new (mobile-optimized) Google Maps v3 api - http://j.mp/lbsdemo. Code is here - http://hitching.net/2009/11/10/location-aware-mobile-web-apps-using-google-maps-v3-geolocation/
I'm working on setting up a GeoJSON front-end to the GIS database that I'm working on. That would allow similar sorts of apps using whatever information we have stored locally.
Posted by: Derek Morr | 02/18/2010 at 09:17 AM