Hi Jeremy,
I'm glad to see some geocache maps opened up! Some of us would be
thrilled to help you serve these up using open standards if you were
at all interested. This would protect you from, what should we call
it.. vendor lock-in - and conceivably boost interest in geocaching in
general.
Once you've made that leap, I think you'll find us wrapping up
geocaching maps using several technologies that you could also copy/
re-use, etc.
Any thoughts?
Tyler
On 14-Jul-06, at 6:47 PM, Jeremy Irish wrote:
For those new to the mailing list, I posted in the past my concerns
about taking something like Google Maps and mashing them with
existing applications - and therefore relying completely on an
external company with no formal relationship. Well, it didn't take
long for us to realize that we might and well hang out with the
cool kids and smoke some Google Maps.
Here’s a link to our approach with Google Maps + Geocaches:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/gmnearest.aspx
It centers on an area close to Groundspeak headquarters, but you
can use the Yahoo web geocoding service to zoom in on whatever
region you like.
Our approach in the page design was to have a basic application
where you could seek out all the caches, and a premium version that
would allow you to use additional features like bookmarking
different caches you want to seek out. Our hope was to increase
Premium Memberships which are ultimately the lifeblood of the
company, while still providing useful tools for the casual
geocacher. As you can see I think we created a happy medium.
Our approach at this point is we can still provide the basic,
previous method of doing searches from a distance and showing those
results while experimenting with alternate mapping methods like
Google Maps and Earth. Like this:
http://www.geocaching.com/seek/nearest.aspx?zip=98121
We also played with Ka-map but decided it is still a bit too early
in its infancy to rely on for a production mapping tool, but are
happy to know there is an alternative in case the mapping switch is
turned off or mangled with advertising.
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