taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Update: This is now fixed. See here for details…

Here’s the 2lmc boys getting rightly annoyed about Flickr’s new mapping feature, which displays geotagged photos overlaid on a mapping UI — as they note, it’s basically a steaming pile of crap outside the US:

However, because Flickr are owned by Yahoo, they’re using their maps. And, like all Yahoo! products, if you’re not American, it sucks.

Compare this lovely data-rich map of SF:

With this featureless grey blob:

That’s just pathetic — there isn’t a single place name visible, and even the Phoenix Park, the biggest urban park in Europe, is simply displayed just as a light-coloured splat with a road going through it.

It appears the Yahoo! mapping data for the UK and Ireland just isn’t really there. What someone needs to do, is take the geotagging data from Flickr, and overlay it on the far more informative Google map data instead ;):

It’s a real shame — I used to rely on Y! Maps to get directions everywhere while in the US. They’re missing out on so many customers here…

Update: good news — the Flickr maps are now things of beauty to match Google’s:

Tags: flickr, geodata, geotagging, insularity, ireland, mapping, yahoo

Web: i caught sight of (8 June 2005, Interconnected), on the geographical insularity of the dot-com boom. A good read:

The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and – just by coincidence – happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.

Lots to think about. He’s spot on, of course — many of the web’s big commercial success stories are almost shamelessly US-oriented, and if they work outside that, it’s purely by accident.

I’d love to see more web businesses that work well for other parts of the world, but that’ll take money — and from what I saw in Dublin, the money either (a) just isn’t there, or (b) frequently goes to the companies that talk the talk, but then piddle it away on ludicrous ‘e-business architectures’ and get nothing useful out the other end.

On both counts, Silicon Valley has an ace up its sleeve. The VCs are smart and well-funded, and the developers have experience, and know which tools are right for the job.

I’d be curious to hear how other high-tech hotspots in the US (Boston, for example) find this.

Tags: boom, influx, insularity, interconnected, june, money, read, sight, talk, web