New/Improved Web Toys

Well, I haven't posted anything serious lately... except for the seriously easy mug cake... so thought it was time for something with a bit more substance.

Playing about on the net as of late, and a few new/improved services have propped up that could be some fun to have a play around with.

Firstly for whats new....


Google Maps Streetview
http://maps.google.com.au/

You can kill hours satisfying your inner stalker with Google Streetview. Google Maps and Google Earth gave us all the ability to look down onto places via satellite imagery, which was all pretty cool (oh look there is my house, taking up a total of 1 cm of screen space)... now Google has introduced to Google Maps Australia streetview.

Streetview allows you to select a location on almost any Australian street, and get a 360 degree vantage point, as if you were standing there on the street. Its truly amazing. Like the satellite images, it is not live images, and it appears most of the Melbourne stuff was done around Christmas time, as I have my Christmas wreath on my front door.

I knew streetview was being launched this year, but I was truly surprised at the coverage. I was expecting the inner suburbs of the major capitals to be done, but to my surprise you can visit many country towns and have a peek around. With such broad coverage the biggest surprise for me has been that they have not covered Geelong???

You can imagine all the people moaning and groaning out there about privacy, but really, they need to build a bridge and get over it. The images are already at launch over 6 months old, peoples faces, and car number plates are automatically blurred out so you can't be identified. The images are from the view of the street, so if someone really wanted to see what your house looked like they could just drive/walk past and get a more detailed view, as the streetview images loose quality when you zoom in.

What has been improved:

Delicious
http://delicious.com/

Delicious has just recently launched a new platform and interface. Most of the base functionality of delicious appears not to have changed, and most of what has changed seems to be purely cosmetic.

Some of the other changes to the platform include:

• new name... the url is no longer del.icio.us by is now delicious.com this is apparently to make it easier for people to remember the correct URL.


• When you manually post a URL now by typing in the URL to save, delicious now goes and automatically fills in the name/description by checking the URL and returning its page title... this I think is very good functionality, and is one thing I could not understand why it was not in the old del.icio.us


• In the improvements they have dropped support for HTML feeds of your bookmarks. Most people won't even know this is gone because they never realised it existed, but for people like me who built apps from it (for work) we have now had to change to using the REST APIs to return the same data.

Facebook
http://www.new.facebook.com/

Facebook has also undergone some cosmetic changes. At first I was not a fan, but now I can not comprehend what I would not have liked about it.

The new interface loads a lot faster, as not as many elements appear on your screen at once.

I love the new look of profiles, as if you look at someones profile who has installed 101 apps, you don't have to wait for each app to load as you did in the old Facebook, as they are now kept on a separate tab.

The new platform also encourages a lot more social interaction with the ability for people to comment on pretty much anything that appears on your profile, such as your 'status'.

LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/

LibraryThing has released a new service which makes all the cover art available on LibraryThing accessible by external app's. In library land, this could be a big competitor to services such as Syndetics which charge for such a service.

The downside... They will only allow you to download 1000 book covers a day, so if you try and integrate the cover art into your library opac, and your opac returns result sets containing 20 items, you will hit your thousand pretty quick.

At Brimbank Christian is working hard on a new catalogue interface to better integrate the catalogue with our web site. To help integrate enhanced features such as cover art into this I have written a little API that sits on our web server, that cache's the cover art from LibraryThing when we initially get it, so we can provide most of our cover art from our own server (its only the first time an items cover is ever displayed it will come down from LibraryThing).

Well that is all I can think of, so if you get bored, have a play on the web and checkout these new/improved services.