Mapping Hacks

In their continuing quest to have something to say about everything on the web,
Google has a phone book service. If you enter a phone number it will often
return listing information, along with an address.

One could refer to this as YACK, Yet Another Category Killer. Google seems
to be good at these. A slightly amusing, albeit I suspect temporary,
aspect of the Google PhoneBook is that they include links to map
that phone number. Well, that isn’t amusing. The amusing thing
is that they link to Yahoo! Maps and MapQuest. Notice anyone missing?

Right! Google Maps isn’t in the house. Another funny thing is that
it doesn’t actually matter that much if you use Yahoo! Maps or MapQuest,
you are getting NAVTEQ data.

But that isn’t very interesting either. What is interesting is that
you can use the Google PhoneBook to map telephone numbers. And at
GMacker.com, ‘Where lazy scientists congregate to excorgitate about,’
they’ve
created a Firefox extension to get driving directions based on
phone numbers.

It has one UI quirk: you can enter your starting phone number, but
you have to highlight the destination from a web page. It also seemed
to take a bit longer to run then seemed necesary. Which brings up
another point…I’m not completely sure that installing random dodgy
Firefox extensions is a completely good idea.

I don’t actually _know_ that my browser has been p0wn3d, but
the plug in was written by “inahg asum” which seems to be an obvious
acronym for ‘I Now am having good amusement (you) Silly User (of) Mozilla.’

(later)
I unpacked the extension and took a look inside. It appears that the
extension is a bit of a wrapper to let you select phone numbers, and the
it sends those to a web service running on the gmacker.com web site.
This has some privacy implications in that all your phone numbers
are belong to gmacker, and stability risks (like, what happens when
gmacker gets too much traffic?), but it explains why the search
takes a bit of time.

But this also reveals a bit about how you can create Firefox extensions
to provide the UI glue to otherwise normal web service. Which ‘obviously’
means that we need to hop right on creating an address or phonenumber
to geocoder.us Firefox extension, as well as a straight phone-number to
geocoder form on geocoder.us.

happy happy fun fun.

Posted in services |

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