MapQuest Blog

Did you know that you can send locations to your OnStar-equipped car using the aptly named "Send to OnStar" feature on MapQuest.com?

The OnStar Channel at YouTube has a short video demonstrating and explaining how MapQuest and OnStar integrate to help you plan ahead for trips.

One of our favorite events of the year is the SXSW Interactive festival. Austin, Texas is a great town to assemble thousands of creative and technical people from all over the world. The conference isn't until March of next year, but already planning has begun. This brings us to the subject of today's post.

Unlike most shows, the public vote weighs heavily on what speaking panels get selected. MapQuest is jazzed to be involved in two of the panels up for voting in the Panel Picker.

Here's the panels we're involved with:

Time + Social + Location. What's Next In Mobile Experiences?

As more devices become location aware, social uses will continue to evolve beyond just who and what, to WHEN. Adding the temporal dimension creates new opportunities for social interaction. Learn about ways to leverage and use technology to add features at the intersection of temporal, social, and location.

We're happy to be collaborating on this panel with some talented experts from innovative companies in the areas of social, temporal, and location. In addition to myself, the panelists for this session will be:

Brady Becker

Founder and EVP of Creative for Brightkite

Tyler Bell

Head of Product for Yahoo! Geo, Geo Technologies

Gregory Cypes

Business Development and Principal Software Engineer for AIM

Ryan Sarver

Product Manager of Platform for Twitter

Andrew Turner

CTO of FortiusOne / GeoCommons

Social Breadcrumbing - Tying Networks Together by Phone

The integration of location-based services, phones and social networks is increasingly common. But how does this enhance the lives of users and improve their actual experiences on sites? Learn about the unique ways that sites are utilizing these services to upgrade their data and promote greater sharing among users.

Organized by our Mobile Technical Manager: Chip Millson, this panel will go deep into the impact and opportunities of data sharing and location-based services.

Vote

We're excited about these discussions almost as much as we're excited to get some Texas BBQ. Please visit the 2010 SXSW PanelPicker and give us a "Thumbs Up" if you're interested in checking out these talks. There are also over 2000 other panels to vote on. Take some time to vote on some other great panel ideas as well.

Thanks and see you in Austin!

I've been making plans for the annual pilgrimage to Austin, TX for SXSW Interactive. Austin is also the "Live Music Capital of the World." Being a former resident, I can attest to this.

So to help me find concerts while I'm in town and to help you find concerts wherever you may go, this morning we released a Tour Tracker widget on MapQuest Local. MapQuest Local is already part of my "where to go, what to do" toolbox, both on my desktop and on my iPhone. As a music-lover, being able to find what concerts are coming to town is helpful. That's what Tour Tracker does.

The Tour Tracker widget allows you to sort upcoming concert listings by date and music genre near your current location. You can also get a map or directions to the concert venue and you can hop over to AOL Music for tickets and additional information about the show.

It's all happening... on MapQuest Local.

You may think of MapQuest just as a maps site, but with all the features we've added over the last year, we're branching out to be a travel resource for millions of consumers. Users are finding valuable services such as our Gas Prices site or finding out what's going on around them using our Local site to enhance their overall travel experience. Whether they're finding what's nearby home or what to do at their far-away destination, more MapQuest users are using us for a variety of valuable travel features.

As proof of the popularity of our expanded resources, Hitwise, a leading online intelligence service, recently presented MapQuest with awards in the Travel-Maps category. Every quarter, Hitwise recognizes the 10 most popular websites in over a 160 categories.

For the forth quarter of 2008, MapQuest is proud to have earned three awards:

• #1 MapQuest.com
• #9 MapQuest Gas Prices
• #10 is MapQuest Local, which was launched less than 5 months ago.

The Hitwise Top 10 Award Program is based on popularity according to the market share of user visits a website receives compared to other websites in their industry during a specific period.

Twitter

When our team set out to build MapQuest Local, we wanted it to be very different than the "local experience" found historically online. One of our early objectives was to make MapQuest Local more social - connect people and ideas in a local area together.

Today we've released a new social widget on MapQuest Local: Twitter. To the techie demographic of MapQuest users, this service needs no introduction, however since we have 46 million unique users a month (including my mom), here's a quick overview for the unfamiliar:

Twitter is a popular short-messaging service for people to announce what they are doing in 140 characters or less. The Twitter widget on MapQuest Local lets you see what people are talking about in their city or town. For any city you visit on our Local site, you'll see the most recent things that people in that area have posted or "tweeted." If you see someone interesting, you can then click their Twitter username to see additional "tweets" they've made or click the "See More..." link at the bottom of the widget for additional local posts.

Nobody knows Local better than locals; Twitter helps you find them and lets you know what they're talking about.

You can also keep up with articles, news and other MapQuest information by following MapQuest on Twitter.

AOL Careers

Another piece of content we're excited to announce is the addition of a widget by AOL Careers through their partnership with CareerBuilder.com. The Careers widget will store up to five different sets of search keywords for job searches. When you change your location, it'll go out and pull in job matches in that area. It's useful content whether you're actively searching for a new gig or just curious what's going on in the local job market.

The First Four Months of MapQuest Local

The feedback has been overwhelming positive and looking at the numbers, it looks like you've been finding MapQuest Local very useful. Don't forget to tell us what you think and what content you want to see added next. We enjoy working on Local, we're very excited about what we'll be adding in 2009.

Have a happy and safe holiday season!

This morning we updated MapQuest Local with some enhancements and bug fixes to make using Local more useful and make it easier to share information.

AddThis

To anyone familiar with blogs, AddThis buttons on sites at the bottom of posts and online news articles are pretty common. However, if you're not already familiar with AddThis, it's a service which allows you to easily share and bookmark pages to some of your favorite web sites, in this case: MapQuest Local pages. You can even use it to email a MapQuest Local link to a friend or set it as your home page (although you've probably already done that).

To use it, simply click the big plus button on the Location Bar at the top of the page and it will open up a list of sites to publish to. If your favorite site is not on the list, just click the "more" link for more choices.

Name and Number Please?

You may have noticed that MapQuest Local works a bit differently than the rest of MapQuest. Much of the address information is coming from other sites instead of our own internal data. As a result, when you clicked the "Maps" or "Get Directions" links, we weren't able to pass along the business name or phone number into your map results. Well, we've fixed that. So now when you click the "Maps" and "Get Directions" links from any widget, the business name and phone number (if available) get passed along too.

A few simple things we've added that make MapQuest Local easier to share and more convenient to use.

Current users of the MapQuest Widget are seeing something new in the places they've embedded it. We've just upgraded the features and functionality to make it even more useful and easier to use.

• We've improved the Maps and Driving Directions experience
• MapQuest Search functionality has been added, allowing you to quickly pull up that address your looking for
• We've added Traffic information; you can now quickly check the roads before you head out
• Performance and functionality improvements

If you don't have the MapQuest Widget yet, you can click the "Grab & Share" link on the widget in this post, on the MapQuest Widget page in the yourminis gallery, or anywhere you see someone has embedded the widget. From there you can embed the widget on your favorite start pages like myAOL or on your favorite social network pages like Facebook or MySpace.

One month ago we launched MapQuest Local, bringing you an easy-to-use dashboard of local activities, events, and other information to give you some "what" and "when" to go with your "where."

Two weeks ago we released a Classifieds widget from Kaango, Used Auto Listings from AOL Autos and added support for Microformats. We also continued to tweak and optimize the page to improve performance and your experience.

Today we're happy to announce even more additions:

Yelp

Yelp provides review information and city guides to help you find out the good, great, and as they put it "not so great" around you. There are reviews for car washes, wineries, pet stores, and much more. I think I've even seen a review for a parking garage. The reviewers are locals and visitors telling Yelp what they thought. Now on MapQuest Local, you can quickly see the best of what Yelp users have found and liked near you.

Sports

Our friends at Topix are providing MapQuest Local with sports news for baseball, hockey, and pro and college football and basketball. Sports is also the first widget you can customize beyond the local city or town. Like other widgets, we try to find the closest relevant content to where you're looking, however we also know that your team isn't necessarily the closest team. Trust us, at our PA office, the our closest NFL team is the Eagles, but a good chunk of our colleagues root for the Steelers. So now you can choose between getting sports news from the local team or from your team for each sport. Just click the little gear icon to flip around the widget and customize.

Links and Tooltips

We wanted to make it easier for you to bookmark MapQuest Local for different cities, so we're introducing bookmark links which are easier-to-read. For instance, if you want to see what's going on locally in Lancaster, PA, your bookmarked link will look like this: http://local.mapquest.com/lancaster-pa.

We've also added additional information to some of our local content by using tooltips. Now when you hover over certain content like photos or used car images, additional information will appear. See below for some examples.

We're Just Getting Started

Our team loves working on MapQuest Local and we have so many cool features yet to bring you. If you have a site with local content and want to show it on MapQuest Local, don't forget to sign-up for notifications about our MapQuest Local Program. True story: A month ago Yelp was the third organization to sign-up, they were great to work with and today they went live on MapQuest Local. Who's next? You?

MapQuest Local now supports the hCard, hCalendar, and draft Geolocation Microformats.

A Micro-what?

Here's a down-to-earth explanation:

With a little help from your web browser, Microformats on MapQuest Local will allow you to save contact information to your address book. For example: the name, address, phone number and web address of a restaurant or movie theater. You can also save event information to your calendar application. So for example: the date and showtimes for a movie, along with the address information. This makes the information more portable and therefore more useful to you.

How do I See and Use Microformat Information?

Many sites have implemented Microformats, but most current web browsers don't have built-in support yet. Future browser releases will; MapQuest Local is ready today. In the meantime, you can take advantage of Microformats through browser plug-ins and bookmarklets.

Here's a quick example on adding a location to an Address Book application using the Operator add-on for Mozilla Firefox on Mac OS X. Your set-up may vary, but the steps will be very similar.

• In #1, I've selected the "Contacts" list in the Operator toolbar. Notice that the locations in the list match locations on the MapQuest Local page
• In #2, I've selected a location
• In #3, I've selected the option to export
• In #4, I now have a new entry in my Address Book application with all of the fields correctly filled in
• In #5, by syncing my address book with my mobile device, I now have the information easily at hand for later reference

Adding Event information to your calendar is pretty much the same process.

This is just another in the many ways we're working on making all of MapQuest more useful.

PS: There are some additional recommendations on the Microformats site for Microformat-enabling your broswer.

Do you own a website with local content?

Would you like to reach over 47M+ Unique Users every month?

As a follow up to our initial release of MapQuest Local, we wanted to also provide some insight into our future Local plans. We know there are numerous web sites out there with rich and relevant local content that would be of interest to our users. So, we'll be opening up MapQuest to enable you to expose your content and drive traffic directly back to your site.

If you want access to the 12^th largest web site audience in the US - an audience who comes to with an interest in one or more explicit locations - bring us your feeds! Bring us your location relevant content. Bring us useful information both general and niche. If you're a venture capitalist, bring us the companies you're backing. If you're a start-up or big Internet powerhouse - let's talk. If you're a one-person operation with a pizza shop review blog: that's great content! We want to hear from you.

We're already working with our next set of partners for relevant content to MapQuest Local for the next batch of widgets, want to join too?

If you're interested in being a part of the wave of content on MapQuest Local, visit this sign-up form. Locations are much more than a red star on a map. With your help, we're looking forward to bringing a more Local experience to all MapQuest visitors.

- Your MapQuest Local Team