Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! Now Support GeoRSS

Lord Satri writes "This week, Microsoft announced their new Live Maps, in addition to supporting Firefox on Windows for 3D, now supports the GeoRSS standard. They join Google which recently announced the support of GeoRSS and KML mapping in their Google Maps API. In short, GeoRSS is a standard supported by the Open Geospatial Consortium that incorporates geolocation in an interoperable manner to RSS feeds. The applications are numerous. With Yahoo!'s support of GeoRSS, all the major players are in and the future looks bright for this emerging standard. As for KML, Google Earth's file format, this new Google Maps integration is not unrelated to the recent announcement of internet-wide KML search capabilities within Google Earth. From the GeoRSS website: 'As RSS becomes more and more prevalent as a way to publish and share information, it becomes increasingly important that location is described in an interoperable manner so that applications can request, aggregate, share and map geographically tagged feeds. To avoid the fragmentation of language that has occurred in RSS and other Web information encoding efforts, we have created this site to promote a relatively small number of encodings that meet the needs of a wide range of communities.'"

No Mac or Linux?

How is it that Firefox is supported on Windows but not other platforms? Can Firefox on Windows use ActiveX?

Re:No Mac or Linux?

Contrary to how it looks like it installs on Firefox, it's not an addon, it's a plugin.

On top of that you need ADMINISTRATIVE rights to install.

Here's the xpi [microsoft.com] for your viewing pleasure.

I haven't been able to extract the exe yet (using uniextract) to see what that might contain.

GeoURL

Looks like GeoURL [geourl.org] is about to get eclipsed pretty badly. It was fun while it lasted.

Tokyo's Reaction

Tokyo's reaction is justified. How else will the people know wether or not the reports of giant robot attacks are real or not?

Neat, but buggy

Virtual Earth is pretty neat, but:

1) It crashes at random just like the IE version.
2) I looked around San Francisco and there were billboards. Real billboards with real ads. Lame.

For now Google Earth still wins. Competition is always good, though.

"Map-making: so easy a caveman could do it"

Incidentally, Google also announced in this blog entry [blogspot.com] (titled as above) it's new Google Maps feature which gives users to draw lines, polygons, place placemarkers, and upload location specific pictures/videos via Google Maps.

To me this sounds like a great feature to share travelogues to my family and friends -- makes them much more interesting, when I can plot my route and augment them with my videos/photos/commentary.

That's why we're announcing My Maps, a new feature that makes it quick and easy to create your own custom Google Maps just by pointing and clicking. You can add placemarks, draw lines and shapes, and embed text, photos and videos -- all using a simple drag and drop interface. Your map automatically gets a public URL that you can share with your friends and family, or you can also publish your map for inclusion in Google Maps search results. We'll continue to show organic local search results with red pushpins; user-generated results will have blue pushpins. The user-created results include KML as well as maps made through My Maps.

Some of the examples in that blog entry are pretty interesting, e.g.: America's Highway: Oral Histories of Route 66 [google.com].

OpenLayers also supports GeoRSS

OpenLayers, an open source (BSD License) javascript library for generating your own maps. [openlayers.org], also supports the GeoRSS standard.

If you ever wanted to use your own set of tiles for a map... this is the software for you. FYI IANADeveloper on it but if you're good with RICO or Prototype you should be. We all need an alternative mapping system that is mature and ready for general use out there for applications that may differ from the norm (like a map of something other than the earth... a building for instance).

Quick, to the Batpole!

Must get down to the patent office and file a patent on GeoRSS so I can start suing people.

I am thinking about buying a gps unit

Are there any that will upload your co-ordinates to google maps? Or is there a way to hack this using certain gps units? Can I download a data file from my gps to my computer and then upload it at home? Help out the newb with some links!

Who would have thought...

Who would have thought that the names Google, Yahoo and Microsoft would all be used in the same article without the words suing or lawsuit.

Other Startups?

I wonder what this will mean for other startups? http://www.grapheety.com [grapheety.com] flagr [flagr.com] ?

Microsoft beat Google to this party

Microsoft actually has been supporting GeoRSS for over a year now in both the developer's kit and via user collections. Last week's Virtual Earth announcement was specifically around the "publishing" of GeoRSS feeds BETWEEN users. This means that users who create their own collections (MyMaps in Google-speak) can make them available for subscription just like any other RSS feed - whenever the owner adds anything to the map, the users will be notified via RSS and will see the updated map instead of having to send a URL or KML file...