I’ve been reading the book “Amazon.com Mashups” by Francis Shanahan. This book covers more than the Amazon API so it has proven to be very useful in introducing me to many other Web 2.0 APIs. Its example for using the Yahoo! Maps API allowed me to map some addresses for an application I’m working on.
I’ve started to use Twitter a lot more after discovering that many of my YouTube vlogger friends are using it. There are also many prominent ASP.NET developers using Twitter so I’m following them as well. Today I created my first bona fide mashup using the Yahoo! Maps API and the Twitter API to map my friends’ location. Although I’ve been playing around with many Web 2.0 APIs, this is the first time I’ve combined any of them in true mashup fashion.
Unfortunately, not everyone I’m following has entered their location in a sensible format so I needed to create a regular expression to filter out anyone who did not use their city and state. I was only able to map four friends. I used their actual profile images as the marker images and their name as the marker tooltip that appears when you mouse over the marker.
You can find the live version here: http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/yahoo-map-twitter.html.
Showing customers, friends, and business locations on maps is a very popular style of mashup. I may add this feature to other web applications that I’m working on. However it does not strike me as being useful information.
One Response to Twitter And Yahoo! Maps API