How Google Redoes Design

A look into how Google underwent a design revolution:

Finding your way…

Two mobile apps for navigating the city in two very different ways:

Embark – maps plus some more hand-holding (i.e. alerts, underground access)

Via Laughing Squid

Serendipitor – maps plus simple instructions to follow along the way — for the more whimsical commuter

Rorschmap

Transform Google Maps into trippy, kalidescopic images reminiscent of the ink blots from Rorschach test.

Check it out here: http://rorschmap.com/

Via Laughing Squid

MINI Maps

Challenge your friends to a virtual race around the world with this clever Facebook app. An advergame for Mini France, MINI Maps lets you design your own racing vehicle and then zoom through life-like cities thanks to satellite images from Google maps.

Via Digital Buzz

Teleport Yourself Around the World Using Google API

So cool.  Select the continents that you might want to see, hit Teleport, and you’re immediately in the middle of nowhere, Africa, or in a random location in Japan.

http://web.mit.edu/~jmcmicha/www/globegenie/

Contributed by Justin Visser

Randomized Street View

With Map Crunch, one click transports you to a random 360° Google street view snapshot of somewhere in the world.

Interactive Music Videos

Broken Bells and Arcade Fire recently released interactive website experiences as music videos. Arcade Fire’s site is done as a Chrome Experiment showcasing the capabilities of HTML5. Broken Bells use Flash.

Become a Foursquare emperor with Mayorama

Mayorama, a new iphone app designed by Daniel Luxemburg, makes it easier than ever to maintain and multiple your Foursquare mayor-ships.

With the 99-cent Mayorama app, you can check on your current mayorships, find out how many more check-ins will earn you mayor at your favorite spots around town and, using the smartphone’s GPS, you can see all the Foursquare venues around you in a list and plotted on a map.

When viewing these nearby venues (dubbed “targets”), the application will also display how many check-ins are required in order to become mayor. This lets competitive users easily find new venues in need of a mayor.

(via ReadWriteWeb)

For those interested in capitalizing on the deal function of Foursquare, Mayorama gives you added ability to protect and increase your current deals. For those interested in location-based gaming, Mayorama opens up entirely new territories for conquering.

Get the app: Mayorama.

Fourwhere: Foursquare, Yelp and Gowalla on a single map.

Around SXSW ’10, Sysomos, a Toronto-based social media software developer, released Fourwhere, a web tool that mashed up Foursquare tips with the Google Maps API to give users an enriched experience of their surroundings.

Earlier this week, the service got a major upgrade, adding comments from Gowalla and Yelp to its map:

Drill into a specific area by searching for it at the top of the site. Right clicking* on the map gives you a menu that lets you either show nearby venues with comments or all venues in the area. If you choose to see venues with comments, Fourwhere will search all three services for tips and display them on the map. You’ll also see a list of all the locations and their comments on the right.

When you click one of the tip bubbles, you’ll see comments from all three services combined in the box, along with an icon to denote which service it came from. Click the user’s picture to get more information about them.

(via About Four Square)

It’s great to see aggregators like Fourwhere organizing the various location-based data bits popping up across the various networks in order to provide users more all encompassing local knowledge.

Leave digital breadcrumbs with DispoMaps

Ever wanted to leave a trail breadcrumbs through the city for your friends or to keep for later use? The folks over Urban Informatics have created an app for that: Dispomaps.

DispoMaps enables you to share your current location on an online map with anyone. The map is constantly updated as you go, using your iPhone’s GPS.

DispoMaps is easy to use. Launch the app, switch Location Sharing to “ON,” and decide how you want to share your location: via SMS, email, twitter, or facebook.

Your recipients will be sent a link to a unique web page displaying a map of your real-time location. Once you have arrived at your destination, you can easily dispose of your map by switching Location Sharing to “OFF.”

Lots of potential uses. Here are a couple that come to mind:

1 – Travel efficiencies/Mass Maps: Monitor your daily movement vs. others and then add efficiencies.

2 – Shared Explorations – Friends can literally follow in each other’s footsteps. Or, if meeting, they can easily locate each other, making meeting up easier than ever.

3 – “A night with [insert celebrity]” – Now Kim Kardashian can take her Twitter audience along with for a night on the town.

Foot note: One of the coolest features of the app is the disposability of the maps. Maps are made and can be shared and then easily deleted through the app. This could make for some very interesting time-sensitive, live events.