Twits On Yahoo! Maps - My First Mashup

Today I've created my first bona fide mashup using the Yahoo! Maps API and the Twitter API to map my friends' location. Although I've been playing around with many Web 2.0 APIs, this is the first time I've combined any of them in true mashup fashion.

This was all done in JavaScript without resorting to any C# or VB.NET code. I've started to use Twitter a lot more after discovering that many of my YouTube vlogger friends are using it. There are also many prominent ASP.NET developers using Twitter so I'm following them as well. Unfortunately, not everyone I'm following has entered their location in a sensible format so I needed to create a regular expression to filter out anyone who did not use their city and state. I was only able to map four friends. I used their actual profile images as the marker images and their name as the marker tooltip that appears when you mouse over the marker. As you can see in the screenshot below, there is also a neat logging window that you can display to help you troubleshoot the Yahoo! Maps API.

I've been reading the book "Amazon.com Mashups" by Francis Shanahan which provided some sample code for using the Yahoo! Map API. This book covers more than the Amazon APIs and it uses C# for its example web applications so you may want to read it. I've been working on a Demand Responsive Transport application so I even wrote some code to display pickup and destination addresses on a map.

You can find the live version here: http://www.williamsportwebdeveloper.com/yahoo-map-twitter.html Just view source to get the JavaScript source code.