Google Maps API Mania

Update (Feb.14/06): Instructions now available to view the BGP Map (see below)

The World of Warcraft Map (MapWow.com) caught the attention of the web and gaming world a few weeks ago as the Google Maps API was employed to create a map the online game's world. The Google Maps API is empowering more than just Google Maps mashups. It's being used to power other virtual online gaming maps, plot IP routing and assemble collages of news photographs:

Perplex City Map - Perplex City is a online virtual puzzle card game that challenges you to find a cube using 256 cards. More from the site: "The cards feature all sorts of problems, from mazes to pop culture, riddles to cryptography, and illusions to crosswords. On the puzzle cards, you can find information about Perplex City - our history and people, how we think, website addresses and phone numbers - and most importantly, about the theft of the Cube. On the back of 192 cards is a 3D map spanning all of central Perplex City, which may prove useful in investigating the theft and learning about our city." (more info) [via]

BGP/Darknet Data Visualization With Google Maps - (From the map's website):"BGP is the routing protocol used in the core of the Internet and it is used to distribute IP address reachability information. Google Maps is great at viewing huge image spaces at multiple resolutions. So I set about making Google maps plot BGP data on a full map of IPv4 address space. The process turned out to be very simple. I wrote a short program that took in a list of prefixes and produced a set of 256x256 pixel tiles for 8 different resolutions. I simply loaded the image files on a web server and wrote some tiny glue javascript to make Google Maps point at my image server."
UPDATE - PLEASE NOTE:
To view the map please copy/paste this URL into your browser:
http://www.monkey.org/~phy/ipmaps/bgp.php
To view more info about the map, copy/paste this URL into your browser:
http://www.monkey.org/~phy/ipmaps/
(Blogger changes the tilde symbol upon publishing so the page you link off to does not match with the Google Maps key.)

Babelcast-Mosaic Interactive Map - The Google Maps APi has been used to create the Babelcast-Mosaic Interactive Map. It is an interactive map which is a virtual space made of thousands of media images gathered over periods of days or weeks. Images are algorithmically deployed, manipulated, and arranged. With the Google Maps API interactive interface, all babelcast-mosaic images created to date may be scaled and explored.

Do you know of other examples where the Google Maps API is being used to display something other than Google Maps? Please post a comment and share it with us! :)

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