Pinboard Blog

Bookmarking Physical Locations

I've added an experimental feature today that makes it possible to bookmark a geographic location. Placemarks work just like bookmarks, except that in addition to a title, description and tags they include a Google map:

You can turn on this feature on your settings page. When you click 'add place', you'll be taken to a map form that will default to your current location if you are using a geo-enabled browser like Firefox or Safari on the iPhone.

The URL format of a placemark is 'http://pinboard.in/place/u:username/geo:xxxxx/zoom:yy/, where 'xxxx' is the geohash of the location, and yy is the zoom level (as determined by Google maps).

For the moment, I have two use cases in mind for placemarks:

1. You are somewhere with a geo-enabled mobile device and want to remember that location.
2. You want to save a Google map view with a description and tags.

There are some obvious additional features in support of placemarking (KML, map view of all user placemarks, map search) that I will hold back on building for a few weeks. I would first like to see whether the feature is useful, and how people will end up using it.

I will be releasing two additional changes this week - the first is the ability to email a "pinned" location to Pinboard from the iPhone maps app and have it parsed into a placemark.

The second is special behavior when bookmarking a Google maps page (the popup will give you the option of saving the URL as a placemark).

Please let me know your thoughts, suggestions and ideas on the Google discussion group!

—maciej on May 27, 2010