After a long summer of traveling and - alas - working very hard, we are now going into our second MapSkip coding autumn…We have a long list of changes and updates we want to integrate into the site, but for a while you will only notice things going even smoother than normal.

We have a couple of big features in the pipeline, but that will take a little while longer.

Let’s start with some technical changes:

As of right now we’ve updated our Google Maps libraries to the latest 2.x standard instead of the “old” 2.0 and we’ve changed all our code to use the new Google AJAX API loader. This has for now only minor consequences for you, but it makes our inner engineer very happy. Also, we can introduce new Google features much faster now.

And as a first new feature based on the new API loader - we use now Google’s new clientlocation feature, which means when a new user comes to MapSkip for the first time - or if a registered user comes back with a shiny new browser - MapSkip will take a guess at your location and open the map around your neighborhood.

A few days ago Google has again updated the Satellite views of the maps we are using here at MapSkip. The full list of updated or improved locations is too long to publish here since there are hundreds of cities from all over the world on the list, but some of the highlights are:

• High Resolution:
  • Mt. Fuji in Japan
  • Bourdeaux in France
  • Three Gorges Dam in China
• 2.5m  Resolution:
  • northern Chile
  • South Africa
  • Namibia
  • Zimbabwe
  • North Korea

There also have been significant updates to many of the large cities in China and several North American cities like Vancouver, Dallas, Chicago and New York City.

Happy MapSkipping!

The first version of our automatic translation feature, while functional, was not much more than a hack into Google Translate. The site integration was problematic and not very user friendly.

But a few weeks ago Google opened an API to their translation engine and we jumped on this opportunity to finally improve this feature in MapSkip.

Here you can see the result of this development - the all-new story translation feature. The translations are now neatly integrated with the story panel in both map and story list view. And as a bonus feature it is now possible to display translations of a story into multiple languages at the same time!

The quality of the translations is of course still relatively uneven. It is very hard for a machine to understand all the nuances of human language and while the translations are generally helpful, they can still be quite entertaining and more often than not bewildering.

We see this feature very much as an investment into the future as we are confident that Google’s efforts will over time lead to translations nearly as good as from a human translator.

Until then, have fun with MapSkip’s story translations, even if the results may be just a little bit more poetic than intended…

You may notice a few small changes to how the site works while writing stories and comments - we’ve gone through some of the feedback we got and have made a few small bugfixes that will hopefully make your experience of MapSkip much better.

Specifically, there should be no more double- or even triple submits of your stories or comments. Please let us know if this works for you!

Happy MapSkipping!

MapSkip has reached the point where the number of stories on the homepage can be a little bit overwhelming! It’s a good problem to have, but still - it’s a problem.

To help with the hundreds of stories jostling for attention on the map, MapSkip now has a new feature on our homepage - Filter Places.

With Filter Places it is easy to review your own places and stories, to check in on the highest rated stories on the map or to follow along with the multimedia-rich stories that are now appearing on the site.

We are planning to enhance and expand the filter options even more in the near future, so stay tuned!

Google has recently performed their first update this year of the satellite views for many areas of the planet. Most of South Africa and many cities of Spain have received high resolution images, as well as Sydney and Auckland.

For a full list, see the Google LatLong blog.

Happy Mapping!

In our first 180 days the MapSkip users (You!) have created 200 stories. Today our user satsuma has added the 200th story to our map of the world and we are looking forward to enjoy many, many more.

Thank You! from the MapSkip team to all of our fantastic users and we hope you are having as much fun with this site as we do.

We are continuously working on new features to make this a better site - if there is anything you would like to see, please let us know via the Contact Us page and we’ll look into it.

Thanks again,

Kazumi & Thomas, Founders of MapSkip.com

A small note about the YouTube integration: It is now possible to add a YouTube video in several ways while writing your story:

You can now either copy the complete embed tag (with object and embed HTML tags), only the embed URL or even the page URL of your video at YouTube (example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4gPNkzQ6YY) into the Add-A-Video box. Our system will sort all of this out and will then pull the correct video when a user clicks on the video button in your story.

One feature that came up on a regular basis in our user comments is video. But we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel on that one and - even more important - we are not interested in competing with the big boys in the video market.

So instead we’ll go with what works best already. You can now add your YouTube videos to MapSkip while creating or editing a story. Just look for the “Add a YouTube video” link in the story editor and enter the embed tag that you can copy from the YouTube video player.

And when you now surf the story list, you can find stories that contain videos by looking for our new TV icon next to the names of the stories. Check out the story To Silverton by Steam to see the new YouTube video feature in action!

The MapSkip Team would like to wish you all a Happy New Year and All The Best for 2008!

Today in the morning we went to Telegraph Hill here in San Francisco and watched the first sunrise of the new year, when a new MapSkip story practically landed above our heads…

We hope to see you here all through 2008 with many stories to tell,

The MapSkip Team