I discovered this little service via Slashdot yesterday, which is a Greasemonkey script that looks for address or location data and, upon finding it, automagically inserts a header with mapping info acquired via the Google Maps API. In this case, the address is ripped directly from the NewsGator site as I was browsing the site in preparation for a meeting I have with them on Monday (thanks to a tip from fellow Denverites Lara MacKenzie and Larkin Kay).
Anyway, while this sort of mashup isn’t a grand effort on the order of Chicagocrime.org or Housingmaps, what grabbed me about the announcement was this tidbit from the original Slashdot post:
This inspired me to create Greasemap, a GPL Firefox plugin that injects a Google map into any page. Notably, it was a 7 hour project which I started when Google released their new API, and demoed the next day on the stage of the conference.
I’m not going to rehash the debate we had in this space earlier concerning the fragility of the Greasemonkey scripts involved, except to say that I continue to be impressed at how quickly developers are now able to create mashups (if you’re the hacker type) or composite applications (if you’re the enterprise type).
I also remain convinced that despite the “house of cards” (altho the author of that statement has softened his stance somewhat 🙂 nature of the Greasemonkey architecture, sooner rather than later we’re going to see GM within the enterprise – if only b/c they have the potential to take some of the load off of beleaguered, shortstaffed IT staffs. In other words, more of this (discussed previously here).
