Bear in mind Google Maps don’t yet work with IE 5.0 - sorry. And I only allow zooming to a certain granularity, to protect people’s privacy.
The geek in me thinks this is kind of a neat visualization. The pragmatist in me says I can now create a link in the text bubble where, when a participant clicks on it, the system emails them custom driving directions to the race based on their location.
This could also be useful in helping people carpool to races. And it wouldn’t be hard to lay down the course route on the map as well.
Can anyone think of additional functionality that might be useful? Color-coding by age group? By finishing time after the race to find the “fastest” areas of the country?
By finishing time after the race to find the “fastest” areas of the country?
It would be neat to see data for say 1000 (or more), 10k races all over the country on one map. You could do all kinds of things… You could compare swimming results and find the fastest pools or the fastest tracks. Since results can be in a somewhat similar format, you could point your app at a link and dynamically render the map. Free map apis are cool.
Uncle Phil’s right, it’s not a hack. The API is available for people to use, and it’s quite friendly.
The web page is generated from javascript (the Google Maps functions) generated by jsp reading a back-end mysql database. The multiple locations on the same map come from multiple markers calling the API. If that makes any sense.