Seems like there's a ton going on here these days. Late last night we deployed something we're all pretty proud of. There are still kinks but we hope you're going to love this as much as we do. Here are the highlights...
Platial Slider
By far the biggest product news is the little slider bar you can add to your maps. Give the slider a keyword and it will find the best stuff from around the web. We're sifting through 36,000,000 places to bring you the most relevant places for your map. And it's great! It works best for common terms which have been tagged often on Platial, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo Local etc. Give it a whirl!
What else is new?
Not a bit of the code base has gone untouched. We've merged and re-architected a ton so its easier than ever to map just about anything.
We've deployed an entire tiling and clustering infrastructure to accommodate and store all of that new slider information across cities and categories. Our Chief Architect, Chris Goad, really deserves a medal for all this delicious geographic data handling and scoring wizardry.
We finally gave you layers. We had to do the back-end to handle of these source layers anyway so we said, lets just build the rest and finally offer layers! Another reason to make more maps!
Updated design and features, better performance on MapKits out in the wild. All 10,000 or so MapKits in the wild have the update, so dont worry- come get a Slider!
Performance will keep getting better- we're growing like mad and our servers are now on their way to Sunnyvale in the good hands of Omar Ahmad, our latest technical advisor and super scale guru.
MapKit available at Wordpress and Typepad.
The fine folks at Wordpress and Typepad consistently go all out for their users and we're thrilled to be a part of it.
Here are a few of our favorite new Typepad and Wordpress users; Messing About In Sailboats., Tia and Nishant Are Looking for Honeymoon Destinations
We want to give an extra shout out to Toni and Andy at Wordpress for
going the extra effort for us although they don't typically allow
javascript. We're thrilled to be a resource for your community!
Any Platial users out there without a blog? Now's a great time to get one for your new MapKits!
Please give us your feedback on all of this. We're still working out kinks and this will take a week or so.
Happy Mapping!
Di-Ann, Jason, Jake, Tracy, Rama, Chris, Sayumi, Tiger and David
Here is the official release...
Platial, The People’s Atlas, Releases Next Generation Online Map Making Application.
Offers Users Instant-Access to 36 Million Places; Wider Distribution through Wordpress and Typepad.
PORTLAND, OR., March 12, 2007 – Platial Inc. which aggregates stories, reviews and multimedia about places from people around the world announced today their next generation online mapmaking tools. These tools include a cool-new interface (patent-pending) offering the easiest way to add content to maps and browse geographic content. Bloggers and site owners can now give their readers even more relevant content and better maps.
Introducing the Platial “Slider”. Platial users now have instant access to 36 Million Places from Platial, Flickr, YouTube, Yahoo! Local and more, making it easier than ever to make great maps which readers and community members can engage with. For example, a coffee-blogger can make a map of coffee spots, add their three favorite cafes and readers of this blog can then add their own favorites. Now, blog readers have an enhanced view with other relevant coffee places from the best online sources. All blog readers need to do is use the Platial Slider (right on the blog) to “Turn up the Volume” and see the preferred amount of available content related to coffee. In addition to being available at platial.com/mapmaker, Platial’s mapkits are now available through Wordpress and Typepad.
"Platial continues to innovate with the Google Maps API, providing users with near-instant access to rich and relevant geographic content with their new slider functionality," said John Hanke, director of Google Earth and Maps. "This enables users to be more connected than ever to information about the world around them."
“Two years ago, Google maps opened their api which started a developer mash-up craze. Now being a developer is no longer essential,” Says Di-Ann Eisnor, Platial Co-Founder and CEO. “This release is a technical milestone for us drawing on an impressive amount of work in cluster/tiling/layers, data handling and aggregation ‘grabbing’ and scoring and more front-end firepower. All still in early stages, of course.”
“This new release supports Platial’s mission to create a world-wide, constantly evolving citizen driven atlas,” says Eisnor. “We’re offering this free tool for as many sites and blogs as possible so The People’s Atlas can grow even faster and reflect the diverse interests, opinions and knowledge of our members.”
About Platial:
Platial.com, The People’s Atlas, is a free
resource where hundred’s of thousands of people around the world share
and discover all kinds of Places. Anyone can map just about anything
including their towns, lives, travels, feeds, files, photos, video and
stories in one simple interface.
Platial has been featured in Wired, NYTimes, All Things Considered,
National Geographic Online and numerous blogs. The company is financed
by KeyNote Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Omidyar
Network, Ram Shriram, Georges Harik, Jack Dangermon, and Ron Conway
among others.
# # #
Thanks Guys! :(
Ok, it seems the guys over at Platial don’t like customizing. They recently put an iframe around their mapkit contents. This prevents anyone (like us) from defining more specific style sheets for the content.
However, if you don’t like this customization and take such measures I honestly do not understand why they don’t put some more flexible options for configuration into the configuration menu.
Actually, I’m quite a bit angry about this, since Jason posted a comment on my customizing article (http://blog.schreiter.info/index.php/how-to-customize-your-platial-mapkit-using-css-important-rules/#comment-8). I guess this is negative side of blogging.
To make it clear to you guys at Platial:
My sidebar breaks in IE7 if it’s larger than 150px. You managed to lock my out and leave me with a more than ugly layout without any chance to fix it. That’s just great… :((
Regards,
to.rben
Posted by: to.rben | March 17, 2007 at 12:14 PM
Hi Torben, and other mapkit users having trouble with our recent changes, thanks for bringing this to our attention. The changes we made we by no means intended as customization restrictions, this turns out to be an unintended drawback, an oversight. And we apologize for it.
If you've been with us for a while, you'll notice a tendency on our part to push stuff out that isn't as fully totally tested as it could be. This is especially troublesome when it makes unexpected changes to other people's sites.
As we venture more into the widgetized world, with our objects on other sites, it becomes critical for us to communicate much better than we have in this release. Part of this communication needs to be a clearer process for our version releases which, when possible, should include legacy version support, but which must, at least, include emails to all mapkit users about the changes.
Feedback about the specific things you'd like control over would also be very helpful.
Posted by: jason wilson | March 17, 2007 at 10:23 PM