Craigslist/Google Earth Mashup

Having just returned to the NYC from my extended sojourn in Atlanta, I am currently looking for a new place to call my own. For those of you who have never been subjected to the horrorshow of frustration and humiliation that is the NYC renters market, let me assure you that finding a decent place in this city is every bit as fun as a frontal lobotomy. Of course, Craigslist is an invaluable resource, but its charmingly minimalist interface is not the most efficient way to browse for apartments. It is all text-based, and unless you have a preternatural knowledge of every nook and cranny of every borough in NYC or know the exact street that you want to live on, it’s not going to be very helpful in terms of giving you an idea of where the hell the place is. Geography in NYC is less about meters and miles and more about distance from subway, bus, taxi, and of course your more traditional amenities, like grocery stores, restaurants, shops, etc… (side note: I wonder if there is an infographic somewhere that gives a distorted view of NYC based on distance to transportation, similar to the US maps that distort state sizes based on electoral votes) Location, as they say, location, location. In New York City, even more so. Regardless, Craigslist provides neither conventional locations nor NYC “locations” in a very useful way.

Good thing there are services like Housingmaps! Oh, but housingmaps doesn’t do subways. If only there was a mashup of the brilliant Subway/Google Maps mashup and the equally brilliant Housingmaps. Throw in an overlay of popular shopping spots, museums, restaurants, photos taken in the area, and music venues and I’d probably flip my shit. That’s like an unholy mashup sandwich.

Well, unfortunately, Google Maps doesn’t seem up to the task. Mr. Frumin (previous Eyebeam fellow, now of Stamen Design), who originally made the Subway mashup, ran into some problems putting Flash on top of a GoogleMap. Turns out that when you put a flash animation on top of the map, even though it is visually transparent, you can no longer interact with the GoogleMap underneath. This means no dragging, zooming, etc. Although he came up with a reasonable solution (limiting the subway map to the inner 2/3 of the map, leaving the outer 1/3 for dragging the map around), I would like to up the ante a little.

I have long been of the opinion that the Web Browser is the Taco Bell of the Internets. Well, maybe that’s putting it a little too harshly, but suffice to say, people are too attached to the idea that the internet = IE/Firefox/whatever, much like people think Run For The Border = Mexican cuisine. Equating the web to HTML+Web Browser limits the ways that people can think about decentralized content. Take, for example, Google Earth. If you see it as a space for sharing spatial/geographical content – much like IE/Firefox are ways of sharing textual and pictorial content, then it becomes a much more exciting tool. When KML becomes as widely known as HTML, very cool things will happen on this here Earth.

What I would like to do is create a dynamic KML file generator for the Craigslist housing section. So, you browse on over to Craigslist, enter your search terms, click a bookmarklet, and BLA-ZAM! Google Earth opens with all of the places mapped out for you. And with oodles of useful user-generated “places” like the Subway and Flickr Photos and the built-in layers for grocery stores, museums, banks, pharmacies, malls, retail areas, and parks, you can get to know the neighborhood remarkably well before even going there. I’ve been wanting to play around with KML anyway, so this seems like a nice quick project.