The multimedia and user-generated online atlas service Platial will announce a new live offering called Today Nearby at the Where 2.0 conference starting tomorrow. The new service will combine RSS feeds of news, photos, videos, events and places with Google Maps and Google Earth. Content will be mapped from Reuters, Flickr, Eventful, YouTube and other users’ maps. Updates to locations of your choice will also be available for subscription.
Platial is one of a number of services that allow users to easily create their own maps on top of Google’s API, but it’s notable for its rapid adoption and financial backing. The company says that Platial hosted 200,000 place maps in 300 cities in its first 5 months since launch. See, for example, Public Biofuel Stations (surprisingly, all East Coast US) or this guy’s Hopeless Romantic Map, chronicling a world’s worth of personal heartbreak, apparently over one woman.
The company’s backers include Kleiner Perkins, Omidyar Network, Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky.
Platial’s newest service makes sophisticated, if logical use of RSS feeds from a wide variety of sources. Leveraging so many syndicated multimedia sources could position Platial well in a field that includes competitors such as Wayfaring, CommunityWalk, Frappr and others. Each of these services has a unique feature set, but display of multimedia and news from off site is particularly compelling.
That will be even more true if users are able in the future to layer selected feeds over their own created maps or make some other creative integration of this new offering with the basic Platial service. The Today Nearby service seems to act primarily as a secondary offering beyond map creation; it will be used for monitoring place-based multimedia, events and maps made by Platial users who are concerned with the same locations you are.
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They seem to have reached Google’s API limit. The maps just display a blank screen.
Nag .B /at/
Startups.in
Nag, I am not seeing that problem. I wonder whether the problem is that you’re looking up places outside of the Google Maps coverage. The anemic international coverage of GMaps is a major problem.
Thank you, opened an account an added a location in minutes
http://platial.com/5urlcom
here is a similar Web 2.0 service - just launched http://socialight.com/
Been watching http://www.moremap.com for a while now they are supposedly launching soon.. looks like the next big Google Map Mashup website
May I respectfully point you to http://www.BlockRocker.com?
- Pulls from Eventful, Upcoming.org, YouTube, Del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, and more.
- Includes tools to create geotags for Flickr (API tool), del.icio.us, blog posts, and YouTube.
- Allows creation of custom rss/georss feeds for any geographic area
- Allows tag searching and browsing across all data regardless of source.
- Allows tags to be added to anything for use by groups, etc.
Platial is a killer site - must be great to be funded! Best of luck to them.
Not sure what it was Marshall but earlier when I visited thqt site, I just clicked on the “Explore” link on the home page and then clicked on a link displayed under “Random Place” just to see a blank map.
I checked some other map now and that shows up fine. Thanks though.
Nag .B /at/
StartupHubs.com
Flagr.com is better than any of these… ridiculous.
I used to be a wayfaring.com fan but overth last few months they have pretty much given up offering support or any updates … for example they still use Google api #1
Platial stands out for its continued rapid expansion of features and great support. Good luck to them
Thanks for pointing out even more players in this space, everyone. It’s crowded and though Platial has gotten a lot of attention, there are clearly many viable options.
Do not forget about pioneers - http://www.MapBuilder.net will celebrate 1st anniversary in a month.
they should plug in all live webcams around the world too…
Vishal, that’s a great idea - like http://www.butterfat.net/goocam/
Reminds me of foundcity.net. They had a similar concept, but it never really took off. Plus, it was mainly cities only.
I visited the Platial site, and I’m already impressed. Hope they have a good showing at Where 2.0
With such a financial backing and imagination as Platial does have, it looks almost imposible to compete with them. That’s why we are trying to focus on local sites, as a way to introduce some of those advantages to people who are only interested in a single place.
Thanks Marshall and everyone. Where has shown that the entire space is continuing to gain momentum. Very excited about Metacarta’s new apis.
Vishal, I found this map of webcams in Hawaii for you…http://platial.com/us3rname/map/5940#I_wish_I_was_in_Hawaii
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