Google Earth Hacks blog

Since we launched Google Earth Football a few weeks ago, over 1,000 games have been played!  So far, Spider is leading the pack with a 17-10 record, with a few players (including myself) closing in on him.  Can you catch him?

We’ve made a few additions to our forum. We rearranged a few things to help clean it up and then added The Lounge - a place talk about anything except Google Earth.

Also, we added a nifty ajax spy to the forums. You’ve probably seen a similar page on other sites - it’s simply a running list of the newest posts in there. It’s kinda neat during the busy parts of the day.

If you have any other suggestions for the forums (or the site in general), please let us know.

Update: In the future, the spy can be accessed via the “quick links” menu at the top of the forums.

We’re pleased to launch Google Earth Football, a creative way to play football from inside Google Earth.

It works a lot like the football games on early PCs - choose a play (”run”, “short pass”, “punt”, etc) and then wait for the results. However, using Google Earth made it a lot more interesting, with ball placement on a real field, screen overlays for various data and things like that.

I’m pretty sure this is the first app for Google Earth to take custom user feedback directly from within Google Earth without using the COM API or the built-in web browser. The other game we made (GEwar, a while back) relied heavily on the browser. This game runs 100% within Google Earth. If you know of other apps that do this, please let me know.

Anyhow, check it out. The game tracks tons of stats and we’ve built a leaderboard so you can see how you compare to other users. If you find any bugs or anything, please let us know in our new football forum. If you’re a Digg user, you can Digg our story.
Thanks!

Mickey

Here’s a new blog to check out - the Digital Earth Blog.

Basically, I came back from Where 2.0 and the Google Developer Day excited about a lot of different products — Google Maps and Microsoft Virtual Earth being two that I’ve gained a lot of respect for.  Of course, Google Earth is still my first love, but I thought I’d probably be wanting to talk a lot about a variety of products.  This didn’t really seem like the place for that.

So, I started the Digital Earth Blog, covering all software related to digital mapping.  For now, the focus is on the three mentioned above but it’ll certainly cover more over time.

This blog will continue to exist and really shouldn’t change much.  It’ll continue report any major site changes or big releases for Google Earth.  Since I’ll be trying to cover a variety of software on the new blog, don’t be looking for deep daily updates on any specific platform.  If you are wanting very in-depth Google Earth coverage, be sure to subscribe to Frank Taylor’s Google Earth Blog, though I’m guessing most of you are already following it.

Thanks!

Mickey

We’ve just added a category selection when you add items to pmShare.  This is used primarily to show different icons in GE for the different types of items that are added.  If you add your local McDonald’s, it shows their logo.  If you add a baseball stadium, it shows a baseball icon.

With this in place, it’ll make it easier to quickly tell what you’re looking at simply by looking at the icons.  As the database grows, this information could be very useful to someone moving to a new area or looking to go on vacation.

I know some of you are thinking that this could make the network link a big mess - and you’re right!  Left untouched, the small places like McDonald’s would overwhelm the cool places like baseball stadiums, mountains, zoos, etc.

That’s why we’ve just added a SmartView feature to the network link.  The network link will still show you 50 locations inside of your viewing window, but it will make the more important ones a priority. Places like baseball stadiums, zoos, theme parks and mountains are top prority; schools, churches and major retail outlets are second priority; places like McDonald’s and Kroger are bottom priority.

This means that when you’re zoomed out, you’ll only see the important things.  As you zoom in closer on an area, smaller details will start to pop-up.

Let us know what you think about these new additions.

In particular:

- Our newest files network link now shows each location represented by the avatar of the user that submitted it, rather than just the GEH logo.

- Our most popular files network link also shows the location represented by the avatar of the user that submitted it. In addition, it now uses our new algorithm to determine which files are the most popular, rather than just listing those with the highest number of total downloads.

- Our main network link now shows the avatars, too. Also, instead of just showing 50 random placemarks within your viewing window, it will show the 50 placemarks nearest to the center of your viewing window.

Hopefully these changes will make these files more useful for you.

Mickey

I’ve just created a short video that shows how pmShare works. Let me know what you think.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of pmShare, designed to be a very easy for you to share places with your friends and with the world.

Once you download a couple of KML files that are built specifically for your account, you can add items from within Google Earth and they’ll immediately be visible to everyone else. You can even send a link directly to a friend, which is a great way to share locations without having to worry about uploading, downloading or any of that stuff.

As more people add more items, it will become increasingly useful. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of gems are right in my neighborhood - maybe a great restaurant that I hadn’t tried, or a celebrity that lives two streets over.

This feature is not meant to replace our main file archive. These items won’t have screenshots, and you can’t save image overlays, 3D models, or multiple placemarks at once. This is simply intended as a way to quickly share a wide variety of locations.

Anyhow, check it out! If you have any questions or problems, just let us know in our Site Issues forum and we’ll be happy to help you.

Following after our Spanish translation, our German translation has just been launched.

Check it out - deutsch.gearthhacks.com
Mickey

While it’s still not perfect, we’ve made some improvements to our “most popular files” page. It used to be simply a list of our files, ranked by how many times they’ve been downloaded. The obvious downside is that once a file gets up there, it’s not likely to ever come down (since the total number of downloads will keep increasing).

The new page is similar, in that they’re ranked by number of downloads. However, the count used for that page is reset each month so that newer files have a chance to reach the top. We know it’s not an ideal solution, but it’s a step in the right direction. We have plans to improve it even further, but figured we’d go ahead and put this first step in place.

We’ve gone ahead and launched our new ranking algorithm.  It takes into account various data from the past few days, including when the file has been downloaded most, whether it was a member or non-member that downloaded it each time, etc.  This is reflected in the “Popularity Rating” listed next to each item on the page.  Over the next few days it should become more and more accurate.

Go check it out!

Mickey