Glenn Gillen

From the necessity is the mother of all invention category, I introduce a new product I've hastily cobbled together over the past week or so. Map.ly is a means of 'sharing directions, locations, and maps' with other people.

It is still very much in development, I'm loathe to call it beta as it's probably closer to alpha but still; So what is it's purpose? My girlfriend is forever having to plan meetings and trips for the people in her team, and trying to herd these sheep ahem I meant orientate her colleagues in foreign cities can be tricky. She needed something to accompany their printed itinerary showing all the various locations they'd need to be during their stay, and where they were in relation to each other. And print out a google map for each location seemed needlessly difficult and not that helpful, we wanted to plot everything on the one map if possible.

Enter Map.ly. Double click where you want to place a marker, enter in the name and some details, and save. You'll get a nice short URL back to the map that you can pass around and you can all add your own markers to it. I think support in IE might currently be a little bit flaky, I'll check later today. And there are a number of features still in the pipeline (getting directions between points, entering in addresses, etc.) but I'm hoping it will prove to be something useful. So go give someone some directions to somewhere

And most useful to the geeks out there, is that it's forced me to resurrect a long since dead gem I once wrote for mapping as I felt YM4R and the other Map API gems just weren't ruby enough. Once the feature set is locked in, I'll release an updated version allowing you to do all the cool things that get implemented on Map.ly.