Google Earth Hacks blog

Those those of you that use our forums and use Twitter, here’s a new account for you to follow — @GEHforums.  This Twitter account simply takes any new threads in the forums and tweets out the title of the thread and a link.  It’s a good way to keep up with new discussions without having to wade through the forums each day.  If you participate in a thread, then you can just “subscribe” to the thread when you’re posting to automatically receive e-mail updates of new posts.

Also, don’t forget about the main @gearthhacks Twitter account.  It currently posts items from the blog, but soon we’ll be pushing new file uploads to it as well.

Thanks!

Mickey

If you’re away from home and looking for something to kill some time, we’ve got your answer — GEH: Mobile.  It’s thousands of files from our database in the palm of your hand, in the format of a simple mobile website.  It’s designed with the iPhone in mind, but should work well with any recent smartphone.  Having only been able to test on an iPhone, I’d love to get some feedback from other smartphone users (N95, etc).

The mobile site gives you quick access to about 80% of our file library (no 3D models or image overlays).  You can view the newest files, most popular file, or view them by category.  Every file has a thumbnail, and will link you to the real location on Google Maps — on the iPhone it will launch the “Maps” application and take you there.  In addition, you can sort items by date/popularity, read full descriptions and view comments made by other users.

Visit the site on your phone by going to m.gearthhacks.com.  If you save a bookmark to your home screen on your iPhone, you’ll get a custom GEH icon as shown above.  Below are a few screenshots.

Have fun!

Exactly five months after it first launched, our StreetView section received its 2000th file — not bad!

File # 2000 was a good find — a clear shot of the streetview car in a mirror on the side of the road.

Of the 2000 files, the most popular (by votes) is the “burning car“, which is pretty self-explanatory.  The most-viewed file is “girl changing clothes at car“, with over 24,000 views.

We’ve got some big plans to improve our StreetView section even further, so keep sending us your great finds!

Mickey

We’ve already showed you how you can embed any of our files and collections on your own site, but what if you just want to show someone your house, school, or some other location in Google Earth?

Up until now, you had to:

• Open up Google Earth
• Find your location
• Create a placemark
• Title the placemark
• Save the placemark to your PC
• E-mail to a friend

While those steps are worthwhile if you have a complex creation to share, they’re kind of overwhelming for just sharing a single location.  Welcome, ShareIt!

Using the Google Earth plug-in, ShareIt makes it very simple to share locations with your friends, and/or embed them on your own site.

• Give your location a title
• Find it in Google Earth (using the plug-in)
• Submit!

The script will automatically create a new page for the item, a KML for Google Earth, and embed code for your own site, so you can do whatever you want with it.  You don’t even need to log-in to create an item — just do it!

I’m going to the Georgia Aquarium tomorrow, so here’s a quick look at that amazing building:

Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Note: The plug-in doesn’t current work with Firefox 3, but according to the comments on this post at Google Earth Blog, we should see an update for it any day now.

We’ve just added support for the Google Earth plug-in to another area of our site — the collections.

Now, when viewing a collection you will see a link that says “View this entire collection using the Google Earth plug-in”.  This will bring up a page with the plug-in on the left and the collected files on the right.  Click a thumbnail to fire it in the main window.  It makes browsing collections much easier!  Here is an example using the NASCAR collection.

But we’ve taken it a step further.  If you see a collection that you like, you can grab the embed code and embed it on your site!  The script will build a smaller, more lightweight version of the collection designed to run on your site.  Here is the NASCAR collection using the embed code:

Since we’ve already built support for you to view our entire collection of 20,000+ placemarks using the plug-in, it only makes sense that we give you the power to embed those, too.  If you view ANY of our files on their Google Earth Plug-in page (like this page for the Hoover Dam), there is some embed code on there now, too!  Here is the Hoover dam using the embed code:

If you have any questions or problems, please let us know.

To go along with all of the new features from a few weeks ago, we’ve just added an arcade to the forums.

I’ve installed a handful of fun games, so check them out and see if you can top the leaderboard.

If you have any game suggestions or problems, please use our Site Issues and Questions forum.  Have fun!

We’ve just upgraded our forums to vBulletin 3.7.0, which adds a ton of new features!  Some in particular:

• Some social networking kinds of features, such as friends and groups.
• You can create photo galleries, either for yourself or as part of a group.
• Your profile pages are much better looking and more informative.  Here is SpiderX22’s profile for an example.  In addition to the new vBulletin features and layout, your profile page also shows how many files you’ve uploaded, how many StreetView locations you’ve added, and your current progress in GEMMO.  You can also leave messages for users directly on their profile page.

There are a ton of other small bug fixes and enhancements, but those are the major changes.  If you have any problems, please let me know.  Have fun!

With the release of the StreetView API a few weeks ago, followed by the addition of StreetView to Google Earth a few days ago, I figured it was time for us to open up a section on the site that was dedicated to showcasing fun StreetView content.

Voila! – www.gearthhacks.com/streetview

I’ve tried to make it as easy to use as possible.  If you are looking at a cool StreetView location in Google Maps, just grab the URL from inside of the “Link to this page” link and add it to our site.  The server takes it from there.

Your submissions will show up immediately.  You can vote on existing submissions (a single up/down vote) to help sort out the good from the bad.

I had hoped to be able to dynamically generate KML files for each submission that would fly you into the same view in StreetView in Google Earth, but that doesn’t appear to be possible.  I’ve done the next best thing, which is to dynamically generate a KML for each StreetView location which will fly you to that place in Google Earth — it’s up to you to enter the StreetView bubble and look around.

Play with it, add stuff, break it, etc.  It may be a bit buggy, so please let me know if you see any weirdness.  I wasn’t sure what categories to start with, so please suggest some more categories here.

Have fun!

We’ve added a few more cities to GEMMO, bringing the total to 25. The total area around those cities currently have 16,216 enemies waiting to fight!

There are over 600 people playing the game. Be sure to check out the leaderboard and see how high on the list you can climb.

If you have have any questions, problems or suggestions, you can use our GEMMO forum. Have fun!

Digg it!

It’s time for you to play! We’ve moved the game into public beta, so go download your copy of GEMMO and give it a shot.

Let us know what you think in our GEMMO forum, as the game is certainly not complete. Our first job will be to stamp out any bugs that come up, then add more enemies/cities/weapons/spells, then start working on new features. Your input is very helpful, so feel free to speak up.

Before you play, you might want to read our brief “How to Play” thread. It should give you a good idea of how to get things done in the game. Have fun!

Update: Digg It!