Mashup of the Week

It's been a little more then a week... Chalk it up to quite a bit of traveling. I'm around now until December, I promise ;)

This weeks winner: Mappington
API's used:

• Eventful
• Flickr
• GeoNames
• Google Maps
• Kayak
• Microsoft Virtual Earth
• Technorati
• Weather Channel
• Yahoo Answers
• Yahoo Local Search
• Yahoo Maps
• Yahoo Traffic
• Yahoo Travel
• YouTube

Why it won: Mappington is the most inclusive map / location information hub I have ever come across. "Mappington is a user created atlas of the world." It covers the following:

• Maps: Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, Google Earth
• Photos: Flickr
• Videos: Youtube
• Wikipedia Entries
• Opinions / Rating section
• Social Web on Wikipedia, Facebook, del.icio.us, furl, Yahoo MyWeb, Wink, ma.gnolia, spurl
• Discussions
• History
• News: Yahoo News
• Blog: Google Blog Search, Technorati
• Hotels
• Flights
• Weather: Weatherbug
• Events: e:vene
• Trips: Yahoo Travel

The layout is crisp, clean, and easy on the eyes. There are minimal load times and Mappington makes good use of Ajax. If you are planning a trip or just want to explore new places, Mappington is the best place to do it. I'm definitely going to use it to plan out my trip to Ireland in a few months.

What I think it could improve on:

• The video's don't show that you can click on them (mouse pointer does not change)
• The photos should tap into Picasa Web also
• In the News section, it looked like there was supposed to be a left frame (Google News maybe?) but it never loaded
• I wish you could blow the map up full screen
• The thumbnail view in Google Maps wasn't working
• Mappington should build some widgets / gadgets to get more exposure on personal web pages and sites like myspace

Runner Ups

Wind Surfing Clips

• API's: youtube
• Clean interface
• For such exciting and energetic video's, the template is pretty bland
• I'd like a link to the original video on youtube

Baby Name Map

• API's: Google Maps
• Very fitting interface
• Maps are slow
• The Javascript pop-up UI feels very out of place compared to the site's theme

My Next Dive

• API's: Google Maps
• The popup on the main page won't go away

My Map Chat

• API's: Google Maps
• Global shout outs are very entertaining

Zoogle

• API's: Amazon eCommerce, CNET, del.icio.us, Digg, eBay, Flickr, Google Search, Windows Live Search, Yahoo Search, YouTube
• The search box doesn't understand spaces?!? Ex: I put in "Tim Broder" it returned nothing and asked me if I meant "Tim+Broder" which returned some results that I expected

Croatia-Map.net

• API's: Google Maps
• Very smooth, clean, well done

CADoogle
Demonstrates Autodesk Freewheel. Allows you to search, preview, and download publicly available CAD files indexed by Google. It is free to use and leverages Google Search and Autodesk Freewheel Web services.

• API's: Autodesk Freewheel, Google Search
• Sluggish
• Heavy Loads