Adding maps

Adding maps to CouchSurfing is an important improvement.

(see also Google Earth integration) (see also TripTracker)

Why

Maps can make it easier to find other users (visually, so you don't have to know which cities are where).

Maps can help with the following situation: members in cities (especially well-known cities) get lots of guests, while members in rural areas get none. The reason (at least one of the reasons) is the following. If you want to couchsurf in a certain place, you don't know the area and where cities are located. As a consequence it is very likely you end up inserting, in the textual search interface, the name of the only big city you know in the area. So couchsurfers that are not in the big city are not findable and hence they get no requests.

Maps can definitely help in finding couchSurfers that live out of known cities, i.e. if I want to go to the North of Paris, I will be able to visually see who hosts there, without having to know the name of the small cities there. In this way, some requests will move from overloaded members in known cities to "I want to host but nobody asks"-members in little-known cities and rural areas and everyone will be happy.

Moreover, maps are fun to navigate and have a very informative power that is easy to master and grasp.

Simple example

Just in case you are not familiar with Google maps and what you can do with few lines of javascript (this is actually using the very old API of Google Maps)

http://sra.itc.it/people/massa/private/gmaps/cs_maps_test_001.html (click on pink marker)

A CS example programmed by Casey back in the day: http://www.couchsurfing.com/googlemap.html (zoom in to Hawaii)

How

One proposal is to embed maps in the site using mapstraction, a library which provides a common API for Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's javascript mapping APIs to enable switching from one to another as smoothly as possible.

Another one is to use Alternatives to Google Maps.

OpenLayers is a flexible and opensource map system that can handle a variety of sources and is fairly easy to use. See the examples gallery.

Discuss which is more convenient in the discussion page.

First step: understand and report which maps features are already available in CS.

Second step: implement new Maps features

Useful links about maps online

Useful links about maps

Comments

Risk for users privacy

Maps of large areas to inform people of where registered couchsurfers are is a good idea. each city/country could list the number of registered CouchSurfers in that area. This would be especially useful for route planning. Its useful to be able to see where there are Couches available but I would suggest that having maps of cities with users pinpointed would be a dangerous violation of people's privacy. ~~Metal.lunchbox 11:30 sept. 28, 2006

we could choose to show on maps only users who explicitly agreed on being shown, or we could plot CSers not in their precise location but with a certain noise error, i.e. a radius of 1 kilometer for instance so that you know the CSer is in there but you don't know where and anyway this problem applies only when the level of zoom in the map view is very high. How does it work now? Addresses are never shown on the user profile page? --Phauly 10:11, 5 October 2006 (EST)

heres an idea; only plot the city and country of an address on the user profile page. If the user agrees to send someone his address, the full address can be used for a plot. Getting just city and country out of the full address is pretty trivial, technically. --A la Mode 16:34, 31 January 2007 (EST)

If I'm right there's some specification in RDF / FOAF geotagging dictionary to define the noise feature Phauly was referring to. I'm trying to quickly google for it but with no luck... will get back with more info. From a bird's view the idea was to let users specify address info on a region / city / street / house level. We could do the same --Bru 19:14, 23 February 2007 (EST)

From PeregrI: I.m Goıng to put some things like TripTracker In My blog. and I.m going to change a mınute of the coordinates for not regıstered people. remove the seconds for regıstereds and left all the coordinates only for my family.