Yahoo Releases Heapin' Helpin' of Map APIs

One of the nice folks at Yahoo dropped me an e-mail about a whole flock of new APIs being released for Yahoo Maps. You can read about them at the Yahoo Web Services 'blog (http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/) or get the documentation at http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/.)

When I said flock of APIs I wasn't kidding. While there is still a simple API, there are now Flash APIs (three of them!), an AJAX API, Geocoding API, Map Image API, Traffic APIs (two of them, one for building an RSS feed), and two local search APIs.

Yahoo Maps has an application gallery at http://developer.yahoo.net/maps/applications.html. One that showcases a lot of these APIs is the Local Events Browser, at http://api.local.yahoo.com/eb/demo/. (It doesn't work in Opera, works fine in Firefox.) It's a mash up that shows you local events in San Francisco. To see the local events in your hometown, click on the name of the location and type in the city state you want. (You can also type in a zip code.) The map window will refresh to show a map of the area -- you may have to zoom out to start seeing pointers to events. Listings of events are on the right. The listings will refresh as you drag the map around and zoom in/out. At the bottom of the page are a calendar to focus on specific days and a small tag cloud to focus on types of events.

Click on the name of a venue and you'll get a list of events at that venue. Click on the small white pointer beside an event name and you'll get a few more details. There's another link that'll launch a separate page for event information.

Hmm... I may have to start diving into APIs again. Now, Yahoo, if you would just release a few more APIs... like, oh, say, for Yahoo Groups....

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