This is a great case when two APIs get hooked up to make something greater than what each service could offer on its own. Paul Rademach, a tech lead for animation tools at Dreamworks, has connected Google Maps to Craigslist to present a visual UI for real estate listings. You can set your location and price parameters and get a map that you can zoom in on and scroll with pinmarks for every “hit.”
A yellow pin indicates that photos are associated with the listing and clicking on the pin will bring up the information from Craigslist as shown in the image on the left.
I dreamed something like this would be possible with other layers being added in as needed like those old Mylar overlays you would see in atlases or anatomy textbooks. I can already think of two overlays that I’d like to see if I were a homebuyer. Comparables and School Districts. Once geo-locater enabled web services are exposed for this data, it would be fairly trivial. I think much harder is getting this data.
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