Two Google Maps really seemed to capture people's imagination this week; The Flat Route Finder and the Hate Map.

The Flat Route Finder was the most shared map on social media at the beginning of the week. While, after its release on Friday, the Hate Map quickly went viral on social media and almost as quickly was picked up by a number of the websites of the national and international press. 

 
The Hate Map is a heat map of offensive messages made on Twitter. The map shows the rough location of every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 - April 2013 that contained one or more of ten 'hate words'.

The offensive words mapped include 'racist', 'homophobic' and 'anti-disability' terms. Users of the map can view heat maps not only of these general themes but can also explore heat maps of the ten individual hate words.

 
As a semi-keen cyclist the thing I hate most in the world (after cars, buses and trucks) is hills. I really, really hate hills.

Thankfully I can now use the Flat Route Finder to find cycling routes that avoid the steepest slopes. The Flat Route Finder uses the Google Maps elevation service to suggest the flattest possible cycling route. Two elevation graphs are also provided to show you the steepest parts of the route and the route itself is colour-coded to show you the easiest and most difficult stages of the journey.

 
Also this week, The New York Times published an interesting Medicare Map that shows how much different hospitals charge Medicare throughout the country, for the same treatment.

The map compares the charges made at 3,300 hospitals nationwide for the 100 most commonly performed treatments and procedures. The colored markers on the map show whether individual hospitals charged less than the average (blue markers), 1 to 2 times the average (yellow) or twice the national average (red).

 
TweetMap is a Google Map of a massive 95 million global tweets. Currently the map displays geo-tagged tweets from 10th December 2012 to 30th December 2012.

If mapping 95 million twitter messages wasn't impressive enough the map also allows you to query the tweets by time, location, and keyword. For example, the heat map above shows all tweets mentioning 'Christmas'.

TweetMap really is a great resource for exploring Twitter data. Hopefully in the future TweetMap will be able to add data from a wider date range.  

 
Thanks to Isuzu Trail View it is now possible to take a virtual Street View drive on some of South Africa's best off-road trails. Isuzu equipped a Isuzu KB with a 360 degree camera and captured custom Street View imagery of four off-road trails.

Users can select any of the four trails and view the 360 degree imagery just as they would with Google Maps Street View. Each trail includes a handy little feature that allows users to capture a picture of any particular beautiful view you find and then share the image via social media. 

 
Climate Commons is a Google Maps based application for providing news and information on climate change in the USA.

Climate change stories are presented on the map by location. As you zoom in on a location on the map the sidebar automatically updates to display the stories immediately visible in the map view. Climate change data can also be viewed on the map by selecting the category tabs in the upper left-hand corner of the map. Users can explore the climate data by annual averages, monthly anomalies or extreme events.

 
This week Young Hahn wrote a very popular article / tutorial for A List Apart. The post, entitled Hack Your Maps, explains some of the design and coding choices made when creating an online interactive map.

The map that Young walks through in the article shows the locations of some of the most important scenes in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans. The map includes some gorgeous map markers, styled map tiles and an innovative scrolling navigation device. It's definitely worth checking out both the map and the article.

 
This week I came across another really interesting article / tutorial looking at the creation of an animated map of one cab driver's shift in Boston. In Replaying the Night of a Cabbie Dan Shultz explains how he created a map that tells the story of an eight hour cab driver's shift in five minutes.

You can view the animated map itself on this Boston Globe article, The Cab Driver's Map.

 
I was also really impressed this week by a map by Greenpeace. Into the Arctic is an impressive map that is following the journey of four young Arctic ambassadors as they travel to the North Pole.

The aim of the expedition is to trek to the North Pole and lower a flag 4km to the seabed. Attached to the flag will be a capsule containing more than two and a half million signatures calling for a sanctuary in the uninhabited area around the pole.

The expedition is still continuing so you can check back each day to find out how the young explorers are progressing in their journey to the North Pole.

Steetmap suit claiming Google uses "uncompetitive" practices follows announcement by six data protection authorities that they will sanction search giant for privacy noncompliance.

British online mapping company Streetmap has launched a court battle against Google, alleging that Google promotes its own maps over those of competitors like itself.

Google's actions have made Streetmap's products "harder to find," the Milton Keynes-based company says -- and that its charges reflect on-going European Union antitrust probes into whether Google favors its own services over competitors in search results. 

"We have had to take this action in an effort to protect our business and attract attention to those that, like us, have started their own technology businesses, only to find them damaged by Google's cynical manipulation of search results," Kate Sutton, commercial director of Streetmap, told the Bloomberg news service Thursday. Details of the firm’s complaint were lodged in mid-March in a London court but are only now being made public.

Streetmap says it is a privately owned company with the owners managing and developing the business and that all its technology is self-created and managed, "from massive multi parallel software that powers the web engine to the high performance secure data centers that are used to deliver the mapping services."

The news comes during a rough period for Google in Europe. Last week, six European data protection agencies, in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the U.K., said they were contemplating legal action over Google's approach to privacy. The agencies say legal action is necessary because Google has refused to comply with a four-month deadline they set for it to change its internal data protection structures.

According to France's data watchdog agency, CNIL, which spearheaded the probe, Google did not change course despite a warning in a mid-March meeting with representatives of all six bodies. The U.K.'s Information Commissioner confirmed it was looking at Google's policy but said it could not add further comment because the investigation was ongoing.

The European privacy scrutiny began when a Brussels working party found Google's privacy policy did not meet Commission standards on data protection and that the American company ought to do more to let users check what information was held about them. In a statement sent to the official French news agency AFP, Google defended its privacy policy as respecting European law and allowing it to "create simpler, more effective services."

 
The introduction of draggable polygons into the Google Maps API has proved very popular with developers. A number of developers have used draggable polygons to demonstrate the effects of Google using the Mercator Projection in Google Maps.

Google itself created a demo game, called the Mercator Puzzle. The game uses a number of country shapefiles that when moved along the lines of longitude resize to show the country's correct size anywhere on the map. 

Darren Wien's has also used draggable polygons to create a Draggable Tissot Indicatrix. This Google Map places a number of circles (all with a 500km radius) all across the globe. You can see how the Mercator Projection distorts the circles in the screenshot above. In the app itself all the circle polygons are draggable. So, with this interactive Tissot Indicatrix, you can actually move the circles around the map and observe how they grow and shrink along lines of longitude.