Molly Kennedy of the Twin Cities are Meals On Wheels has created a wonderful Google Maps mashup of Twin Cities metropolitan Meals on Wheels locations. She used Google’s new MyMaps feature.
We helped them out embedding the map into their web site, but Molly did all the hard work of creating the map and drawing the service boundaries. The map is an excellent, real-world, practical example of a maps mashup.
Google really needs to improve the ability to unearth quality citizen generated content like these maps, though. If you search for Twin Cities Meals on Wheels at Google Maps, you’ll get a list of locations, but the only way you’ll find this specific map is if you scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on See user-created content.
A few improvements:
- The link should be called "See user-created maps", not content.
- For any search that has user-created maps associated with the keywords of the search, perhaps the link should appear at the top of the list of locations, next to "Modify search."
- Include a link to any user-generated map that is associated with an "official" location, within that location’s listing; perhaps next to or within the "more info >>" link.
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