Websites: November 2006 Archives

Everyone was super impressed when Google Maps came out, all decked out with Ajax and an API for others to hack into. Their maps heralded an age of mashups and rushed copycats from competitors like Yahoo!.

The other day a buddy of mine shows me Google Maps on his Treo. I go "WHOA". It's got the same type of AJAX-like interaction as the web site! You can drag it around and when you go off map, it automatically connects to the Internet and grabs new images. You can also put it in satellite mode and surf around locations while looking at real buildings!

The real kicker is this. You can look up businesses on the map and get directions. What a godsend. Up to now, yellow page applications have all sucked on mobile phones. Now Google Maps Mobile makes it all worthwhile. You look up a business, little pins denote business matches, you click on one to get more info, and you can get directions to go there.

And thank god for the Google war chest to fund dedicated apps for a whole suite of mobile phones! I also downloaded Google Maps onto my Motorola SLVR and it works a little bit hokey in the sense that it keeps asking me for permission to connect to the internet, but it also performs wonderfully.

Find this and more great Google Mobile apps at http://www.google.com/mobile/. The Google Maps Mobile app is available at http://www.google.com/gmm/. Now I must try out Gmail for Mobile phones....

I just recently rediscovered Yelp, a website which uses the community to rate businesses. When it first came out, I got invited to signup and I did, but I didn't really do much with it.

Then I began using it to lookup places to eat in hopes of using other peoples' opinions to sway me one way or another. It was my hope that the opinions of Yelpers would help me better than using Zagats, which, to me, is no help at all.

Why is that? It's because Zagats has EVERY restaurant in the universe in there. How do you pick from a list of a 40 5-star restaurants? They all seem the same given the text descriptions. Maybe it would be better if they had pictures, but they don't. Generally, it doesn't cater to my tastes in particular.

The Black Book series of city guides has been the best thing so far. Somehow I've connected with the reviewers who put that together and they've consistently picked restaurants that I know I like. It's the best guide for me out there.

I hope that Yelp can become the same thing for me.

But most importantly, I wanted a place to remember where I went and how I felt about it. Yelp provides a nice GUI to do that. And they have a nice mobile implementation to be able to look up stuff while on the go.

Check out my Yelp reviews with this handy module:

Do your tastes mirror mine?