The Titanic Passenger List on Google Maps

Every blue moon a non-Google Maps API map is so good that we feature it on Google Maps Mania. This ESRI story map is one!

Geography, Class and Fate: Passengers on the Titanic is an in-depth analysis of the passengers on the ill-fated Titanic. The map shows the route of the ship and where it hit the iceberg that led to its sinking.

What really makes this map stand out however is the passenger data. The map shows where every passenger on the Titanic was from. You can compare the survival rates of the passengers from the different classes, which show how first class survival rates were higher than those in second class, which in turn were far higher than those in third class.

Clicking on an individual passenger will show more details including their age, where they boarded the Titanic, their intended destination and, if they were one of the lucky ones, what lifeboat they got on.

Bookmark Your Favorite Locations

Pin Drop is a great way to bookmark your favorite locations on a Google Map.

Have you ever found somewhere cool and thought 'I must come back here' and then later forgotten where it was? Or have you tried to tell friends about somewhere but you couldn't quite remember where it was? Pin Drop helps you to keep track of your favorite locations.

Saving locations to Pin Drop is very easy. You just need to add a pin to a Google Map. You can tag and color-code your pins so it easy to quickly find all your favorite cafes, galleries or shops when you need to find them.

Pin Drop is also available as an iPhone app so you can access your saved location when you are out on the town and you can also bookmark new locations as you find them on your travels.

Friday Fun with Google Maps

Chinese artist Lu Xinjian creates paintings inspired by Google Maps. His series of paintings City DNA are re-imaginings of the Google Maps satellite view of a number of cities.

They are also rather beautiful.


In the UK Merceds Benz are running a TV advertising campaign that extends the idea in their clever viral game, Escape the Map. This week I also came across this 'making of' video. Who knew it was so hard to recreate the world of Street View?



Minecraft Comes to Life. Fans of Minecraft will love this. FigurePrints can make a 3D replica of your Minecraft world. I now have a burning desire to map out my neighborhood in Minecraft and use FigurePrints to create a 3D model of it.

Wolfram Alpha on Google Maps

Wolfram Alpha the online answer engine that gives factual answers to queries by computing the answer from structured data, rather than providing a list of documents, has a comprehensive API.

Jan Pöschko has used the API to create Alpha Maps, a Google Map that allows users to view useful information about locations given by Wolfram Alpha on a map.

To use the application you just need to enter a location into the search box. The map then displays nearby locations as generated by Wolfram Alpha and also returns reams of data about the searched location. The information provided includes demographic information, economic data, current weather and time, crime statistics and other useful information, such as notable people born in the searched location.

Remapping Cities with Google Maps

Livehoods is an interesting project to remap city neighborhoods by ignoring the traditional geographical boundaries and instead looking at human social interactions.

By analysing over 18 million Foursquare check-ins Livehoods, a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, has produced three city maps with new neighborhoods based on the patterns of the groups of people that check-in to Foursquare venues.

So far there are three Livehoods maps: New York City, San Francisco, Pittsburgh. The dots on the maps represent different check-in locations. Groups of nearby dots of the same color form a Livehood. The groups are determined when the same people check-in to two nearby locations.

Create a Google Maps Context Menu

Martin Pearman has released a right-click context menu library for the Google Maps API. ContextMenu creates a menu for Google Maps that appears when users right click on the map.

The menu could be used for a whole range of user interactions. Martin has created an advanced example map where the right-click menu has been used to allow users to set the start and end points to get driving directions. The right-click menu in this example also allows the user to zoom in and out and centre the map on the clicked location.

The code for the context menu has been made available under a GNU copyleft license. Here is a direct link to the JavaScript for the menu - ContextMenu.js

Killing Zombies on Your Phone

One of the most popular Google Maps based games Zombie Outbreak Simulator is now available as an iPhone app.

Zombie Outbreak Simulator allows you to play a game of zombie survival on top of a Google Map of your own neighborhood. In the game your job is to kill off all the zombies before they have picked off the entire civilian population. Alternatively you can just sit back and watch to see how long it would take a zombie invasion to finish off your neighbors.

You can purchase the Zombie Outbreak Simulator iPhone app from the App Store.