Today Nearby is a new service from Platial that pulls together the best News, Photos, Videos, Events and Places from all over the web. Now you can get real-time local updates automatically delivered through RSS or
KML.
This is our first stab at a tool that works with the growing wealth of geo-referenced information and provides a real-time close-up of your city. Try it out, give us feedback, get involved and keep an eye out for further developments. Along these lines, Today Nearby is currently a proof of concept, an "alpha" level product. This means that the feed sources may change, the outbound feeds and formats aren't necessarily reliable (as we change formats around) and there are bound to be huge gaps in data. But, if you are as excited about Places and feeds as we are, this should prove to be a valuable distraction from your other work.
The actual Today Nearby webpage is meant as a preview area for the information that will be included in the feeds. It's not designed to be the most efficient 'reader' of this type of info. To really get the most out of this new service, we recommend using it with an RSS aggregator or Google Earth.
One more thing to point out, each category has it's own feed, so you could subscribe to the Photos from San Francisco, the Events from Portland, the News from Baghdad, and the Videos from Miami. We also have a bigger feed for the entire page that wraps up all 5 categories in one.
As always we're hungry for feedback, so lets us know what you think!
Congrats, Platial continues to improve
A few minor things I'l like to see:
1. More than 20 points showing up at one time on personal maps
2. Info window aboive points showing more info (like photos) when clicked.
3. FYI, I'm not getting any info for News and Bookmarks for Atlant or Geneva, Switzerland.
Posted by: will | June 13, 2006 at 12:37 AM
You've done a great job. Today Nearby is realy a great tool.
Posted by: Peter Schink | June 13, 2006 at 02:25 PM
Neato!
Posted by: Catholicgauze | June 14, 2006 at 08:56 AM
the news is limited at the momment, and we had a glitch the day this launched, so many news items were not showing up. (We seem to also be having a similar glitch in the flickr feed right now).
Posted by: jason wilson | June 14, 2006 at 01:26 PM