I think its actually a useful app, its quick and uses geolocation to grab your location making it one click (after you load the page) to generate a walking tour. It has links to google streetview and offers an elevation profile of the walk and optimizes the route to hit as many points of interest in as little distance as possible. It uses google maps walking directions for the base layer, and it seems to do pretty well with knowing pedestrian paths throughout the city.

I plan to add a few more features in the near future – I didn’t have time to add everything I imagined during the overnight coding challenge:

• Some way to specify what types of points of interest you’d like to walk by
• A way to specify roughly how long of a tour you’d like
• More crazy points of interest based on my experience in SF
• Extend it to work in other cities where I can get enough points of interest, perhaps using SimpleGeo Places API
• A way to save your walk so you can come back to it later
• Descriptions of the points of interest

The code is on github – its currently all client-side using jquery mobile and google maps API, google Fusion tables and other google APIs. Please fork it and add your own ideas or connect it to a different fusion table with your own set of points of interest.

I had my first opportunity yesterday to play around with the GeoAPI geo-referencing service. Although not quite as intuitive as Google Map’s forward and reverse geocoding services, GoeAPI gives you immediate access to geo-located feeds from Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube, plus the ability to create custom neighborhoods (what they called “guids”) for you to query.

Sounds nerdy – so here’s the English translation:

You now can, with a few lines of code, get Tweets happening real-time in your neighborhood.

Fun? I guess it depends on where you live. Mostly what I’ve been finding is that my neighbors are kind of pervs.

Here’s a quick and dirty Python code sample for you to get started. You’ll need your own API key first.

Also, you’ll need to know the latitude and longitude of a point in the neighborhood you’re interested in. Try (37.766 -122.417) for the Mission. Also, because sometimes you get garbage for location data (like Where: !!!!Frisco U noe!!!!), I’ve add a quick parser to find correctly formatted latitude and longitude pairs. Plenty more you can do with this with a few minutes of time.

– Nerdy Part –

import sys, os, json, urllib, re

#usage: python get_tweets.py [lat] [lng]

lat = sys.argv[1]
lng = sys.argv[2]

# Regex to find properly formatted lat-long pairs in the where response.

lat_lng_re = re.compile('^[\D]*[^-^\d](?P[\d\.-]+)\s*\,\s*(?P[\d\.-]+).*')
api = '[YOUR API KEY]'

parent_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/parents?lat=%s&lon=%s&apikey=%s' % (lat,lng,api)
response = urllib.urlopen(parent_request).read()

json1 = json.loads(response)

# Find your neighborhood 

guid = json1['result']['parents'][0]['guid']
print "\n\nYour neighborhood: %s\n\n" % json1['result']['parents'][0]['meta']['name']
print "--TWEETS--\n\n"

# Get Tweets in your neighborhood

tweets_request = 'http://api.geoapi.com/v1/e/%s/view/twitter?apikey=%s' % (guid,api)

response = urllib.urlopen(tweets_request).read()

json2 = json.loads(response)

for tweet in json2['result']:
	print "Tweet: %s" % tweet['text']
	print "When: %s" % tweet['created_at']
	loc = lat_lng_re.match(tweet['location'])
	if loc:
		print "Lat: %s Lng: %s" % (loc.group('lat'),loc.group('lng'))
	else:
		print "Unusable location: %s" % tweet['location']
	print "User: %s" % tweet['from_user']
	print "Profile image url: %s\n" % tweet['profile_image_url']