Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps for Trip planning
By Darren Cronian on Saturday, February 9th, 2008

I am a geek, but I have had so much fun playing with Yahoo Pipes that I wanted to show you how powerful it can be, especially if you integrate it with Google Maps, and the street view tool. As you can see from the example below is of the Millennium Hilton Hotel in New York.

Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps for Trip planning

Using Yahoo pipes I aggregated data from Yahoo local to find hotels and restaurants within 5 miles of New York. I was then able to create an KML file that was uploaded to my server and then added to Google Map.

Using Google Street view I then chose a hotel and clicked on the street within the map, this then published an image of the street and as you can see the hotel. To view it live just click here and have a play around for yourself.


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7 responses to “Yahoo Pipes and Google Maps for Trip planning”

Rohan | 9 February, 2008 at 3:22 pm

Excellent! Not a good advertisement for Hilton Hotels though with the cranes and roadworks in front of the hotel!!!

How old are the photos?

Darren Cronian | 10 February, 2008 at 11:37 am

Rohan, I am not sure, but would you book that hotel after you’ve seen that image haha

It could be used to see what is around the hotel, i.e. is the hotel in the middle of the red light district, or other dodgy area.

Unfortunately, I think the street view is only available in the US at the moment.

mikeyboy | 10 February, 2008 at 2:10 pm

One man’s red light district is another man’s green light district, if you catch my drift ;-)

Nathan | 11 February, 2008 at 10:42 am

Very nice. Can you access custom maps on mobile phones? Guess the ones with more advanced browsers can probably do it but I’ve never tried it.

Darren Cronian | 11 February, 2008 at 12:35 pm

Hi Nathan, long time no “see”

I don’t have a good enough phone to check it out, but if anyone has a PDA, or Apple iPhone that can view Google Maps please could you let me know, I’d be interested to know. All you need to add in the URL is http://www.travel-rants.com/map.kml and the map should be delivered with the Yahoo local aggregated data.

You can also view this file in Google Earth, which I haven’t tried yet.

Andy | 12 February, 2008 at 11:46 am

I will check it out on my iphone Darren and report back. I do know I can view your blog okay on the iphone, but it’s not the same design, why is that?

Darren Cronian | 12 February, 2008 at 1:50 pm

Thanks Andy, that would be great.

Re. the different blog design - the design you are seeing is just text and images from the invididual blog posts, so that it can be read on an iphone, ipod touch etc.

The design for the rest of the mobile phones is just simply text with a few images. The speed isn’t there yt to really make a graphically pleasing version of the blog, but hopefully that’ll change with new technologies.

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