Vibes is a social experiment tracking the flow of kindness across the world. Do you have a friend with the flu? A brother or sister with a big job interview tomorrow? Or do you just want to let someone know you're thinking of them?
Send them some good vibes, and watch in real time as people across the world share their kindness.
Who built it
How do I get it
Vibes is a Facebook app. You must be a logged in Facebook user to add the Vibes application. If you're already using Facebook, you can grab the app here.
Popularity: 31% [?]
As an engineer for Yahoo!'s Media Innovation Group, I'm lucky to get to use the latest tools available to develop engaging and interactive ActionScript applications. So, I'm surprised that a lot of people still think Flash is best used for screensavers and banner ads. For last month's Yahoo! Hack Day, I decided to show off some of the impressive capabilities of the latest Adobe Flash Player and ActionScript 3 by building a visually interesting new way to browse Yahoo! News top stories. In a surprisingly short amount of time, I was able to mash up two existing Yahoo! services, and then represent the information in a virtual environment I call the NewsGlobe.
The NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Y! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information off to the Yahoo! Maps service to find a matching location, and return latitude and longitude coordinates for it. The rest is simply a matter of using the 3D classes in ActionScript to create a visually engaging experience that's either automated or interactive.
Papervision3D makes it incredibly easy to create a 3D scene, add 3D objects to it, and specify where the camera (i.e., the user's viewpoint) should be located. For each story location where we are able to discern a lat-long coordinate, we draw a marker object and place it in the proper position on a sphere representing the Earth. The display is calculated and drawn in real time. This allows us to animate the view over time and even lets the user change the view by interacting with the objects in the scene.
Since the final product itself is a SWF (Shockwave Flash) file, NewsGlobe can live online as a web application or be embedded off-network as a scaled-down customizable badge. It could also be integrated into a Yahoo! Widget or packaged as an Adobe AIR application to run locally on the desktop. By passing in different RSS feeds or search terms, it could be possible to watch stories occurring in a specific part of the world, from a particular category, or matching other keywords.
In all, NewsGlobe was a fun project to test a simple idea and see if I could achieve the desired result within a short amount of time with relatively little difficulty. Is it perfect? No. Could we add a lot of additional features to make it something more useful and accurate? Absolutely. However, I would certainly consider this a successful proof of concept and viable prototype for similar future interactive 3D visualizations.
If you want to learn more about the individual pieces used to create the NewsGlobe, follow the links below:
Popularity: 40% [?]
Lucas J. Shuman, February 12th, 2008 on 6:23 pm
What's next? This isn't a rhetorical question: after today's release of the Yahoo! ActionScript 3 Maps API , it's a question we feel we can ask. With a native ActionScript 3 mapping engine, map control widgets, geocoding, local search APIs, and custom markers and overlays, what can possibly be next? And the answer is simple: whatever you build with it!
The new component is very lightweight (base size is 30Kb), yet incredibly functional, easy to use and opens up a number of the other geo-centric web-services we have at Yahoo!, making it easy to develop overlays and components that build on top of the API in any of your Flash, Flex, AIR or Ajax applications.
To give you an idea of its functionality, during the development of the new API, Jonathan New and Benjamin Halsted of the Yahoo! Messenger team hacked up a really cool flick-able and rotatable map interface for our internal Q2/07 Hack Day, and won for the most fun hack! You can check out their flickable maps hack right here. Try to toss the map around, and shift-drag to rotate around the center. Special thanks go out to them for making such an awesome app.
If you have some Flex or ActionScript development chops, definitely jump in on the fray and grab a copy of the AS3 Maps API for yourself. We've prepared a few screencasts, examples and complete documentation to get you started, and we look forward to feedback.
I would also like to thank a number of people that made this release possible. First, everyone on the Yahoo! Maps and Flash Platform teams, past and present, including Mark Law, Rodney Fernandez and Allen Rabinovich. Huge thanks also go out to Lawrence Morrisroe, Buck DeFore, Ted Patrick, Eddie Babcock, Randy Troppmann, Chuck Freedman, Aaron King, and JR Conlin. Whew.
Popularity: 34% [?]
Zach Graves, February 11th, 2008 on 6:00 am
It seems like a long time ago, but back in March, MapMixer (originally named “Remaps") was born as a hack project at Yahoo!. Hack Day is a 24-hour innovation fest that happens every quarter. During hack days, Yahoos take time off from their normal jobs and bring to life their inventive, crazy, new, and sometimes world-changing ideas. After the blood, sweat, and empty boxes of pizza, what's left is a “hack,” which is then presented to everyone in a two-minute demo.
That's how MapMixer was built – during 24 hours of non-stop caffeine-fueled coding. (In retrospect, this was nothing compared to what it took to get the final product out the door, but more on that later.)
First, let tell you more about where the MapMixer idea originated. As an engineer for Yahoo! Travel, maps have always been dear to me. So, I was kind of annoyed when I was visiting my alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and I didn’t know where to find the visitor parking lots! Searching around the web, I found many maps that didn’t have the info I needed. Finally I found a PDF that had my info, which of course loaded the Acrobat browser plug-in and crashed my browser. (Seriously, nothing but love to Adobe, but the Acrobat browser plug-in often crashes my browser.) All I wanted was a single map with parking details. “Maybe this experience could be better?” I wondered… With that the seed for MapMixer was planted.
I decided to fix this problem for the upcoming hack day, put together a team, and built a prototype. The response was overwhelming. People got it — and loved the concept immediately. Only a couple weeks after our hack day presentation, the project was green-lighted for a public release.
Once we had the green light, we didn’t waste any time. Building MapMixer was like working at a startup, with one major difference: we had access to the amazing infrastructure already in place at Yahoo!. Our team had only two engineers full time, so we had to scrap around for part time help for all other functions.
With support from Adam Chang, a seasoned Yahoo! Travel product manager, we made rapid progress. We had to plan ahead in order to keep the several integration points with other teams internally in order. I got my hands dirty in all aspects of the product release including engineering, design, branding, marketing, legal, etc. It was an intense experience. (I regularly used the sleeping bag and 2 pillows under my desk. No kidding.)
Being able to launch MapMixer is a great feeling, and the coverage was terrific -- but the war was won by many small victories along the way. We are still fine-tuning the application and continuing to think about new ways to make it even easier to use and share.
I hope you continue to find MapMixer useful (and fun)! If you happen to have a good map you’d like to share, don’t hesitate to add it to the MapMixer collection. Check out this
Popularity: 9% [?]
Nimit Maru, November 18th, 2007 on 10:51 pm
TagMaps is a toolkit that gives you new ways to visualize text on geographic maps. TagMaps can be used to communicate key characteristics of location-based data in an easy-to-understand interface. Check out the sample applications, where we use Flickr tags on a map to build a world exploration tool.
Who built it
What people are saying
TagMaps - Mapping and Photo Visualization, Design Demo, Max Kiesler
"Whenever I'm getting ready to travel somewhere I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at images and maps of the location. I usually go to about 4 of my favorite sites for photos and 5 different mapping sites to get ready for the trip. TagMaps lets you do both at the same time and much more."
TagMaps makes geo-tagging useful, Webware, Josh Lowensohn
"TagMaps is a project with a lot of promise. It has the casual, exploratory feel you get from Google Maps, but it also mixes in a dash of visual appeal with the Flickr shots. I could easily see this becoming a mobile-phone app or surfacing on blogs and social-networking profiles."
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TagMaps Toolkit, 7.5th Floor, Fabien Girardin
"Based on their first experiment to Visualizing the Crowd’s “Mental Map” Using Flickr Geotagged Images, Yahoo! Research Berkeley has now introduced their TagMaps toolkit..."
New callback function in TagMaps, Yahoo! Developer Network blog, Shane Ahern
"So, today, we are releasing an update to the embeddable TagMaps badge. Using the updated module, you can implement a JavaScript callback function on the page where you have embedded TagMaps. On that page, then, you can create any service you can think of that takes advantage of knowing what tag the user is interested in, and where in the world it is located."
Popularity: 17% [?]
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