Geotagged at home (51.427051,-0.333344)

Map Push Pins vs. Dots? Google Map Engine vs. Dotspotting?

Yesterday, Google launched their Maps Engine Lite beta; a way of quickly and easily visualising small scale geographic data sets on (unsurprisingly) a Google map. The service allows you to upload a CSV file containing geographic information and style the resulting map with the data added to it. I thought I'd give it a try.

I turned to my tried and trusted data set for things like this; a data set I derived from a Flickr set of geotagged photos I'd taken of the London Elephant Parade in 2010. It's a known data source and I know what the results of this data set will give me; it lets me do a reasonably meaningful visual comparison of how a particular product or service interprets and displays the data.

Google Maps Engine

Reading up on Map Engine Lite, I noted that I could only upload a maximum of 100 data points into a layer on the map, which wasn't a problem as my data set is localised to London and contains only 10 pieces of information, one for each photo I'd taken. Once I'd uploaded the data I could style the colours of the push pins and the background style of the map. It looks pretty good, even if you are limited to 100 points per layer and it's for strictly personal and non commercial use only.

But I was sure I'd seen this sort of thing before and I had, in the form of Stamen's Dotspotting. I already had an account with Dotspotting and, even though I'd forgotten about it, I'd previously made a map from my London Elephants data set.

DotSpotting

The parallels are many. Both Map Engine and Dotspotting allow you to upload data in CSV format. Both services try to work out coordinates from the data, if there's no lat/long coordinates already. Both services allow you to style the resultant map.

There are differences. Dotspotting allows you to download your data; it doesn't appear that Google does. Map Engine allows you to style the map markers; it doesn't seem that Dotspotting allows this. Dotspotting supports Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, Flickr and Google My Maps feeds; Map Engine only supports CSV files.

There's also one other key difference; Map Engine was launched yesterday, whilst Dotspotting was launched 2 years ago.

But there's an old saying that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Gary
Gary Gale

I'm Gary ... a Husband, Father, CTO at Kamma, geotechnologist, map geek, coffee addict, Sci-fi fan, UNIX and Mac user