I went to the event with a number of other multimappers who all got down to hacking fairly sharpish...

So now that my friends have all got stuff online I can finally blog about what they got up to…

Firstly is Richard Rutter and Andy Hume, they knocked up a prototype of a really handy app that helps people to arrange an event. One person can setup a “potential” event (e.g. “John’s Stag Do”), they can then enter a number of possible dates, and a number of venues. They then invite all of the attendees to go in and select their preferred choice of date/venue and the dates/venues that they really don’t like. It’s a great little idea and was well put together and Rich did a good presentation in the 90 seconds he had. It was so good in fact that they won the “Most Useful Hack” prize! Take a look at Rich’s blog posting about it here.

Second is Colm McMullan and Richard Keen. They extended an existing Multimap project that they’ve been working on for the past few weeks. They’ve built a Twitter bot that you can send direct messages to and it will reply with directions between two points, a link to a map, or even directions to local points of interest. They spent hack day adding support for the new FireEagle API from Yahoo! and put together a great video to demo it. The video is a spoof of the iPhone advert using the Multimap Twitter Bot to get directions to the nearest cinema and “seafood”. Link to the video coming up, but you’ll want to either take a look at the Multimap blog posting about the Twitter bot or head straight over here to the documentation.

Ok, now you get to take a look at the video. The youtube version has lost a bit of quality in the conversion so a link to the original higher quality version follows it (26Mb download):

Full version - 26Mb download

Oh yes, and a few final thoughts. It’s not mentioned on the documentation page yet but there’s experimental support for Open Street Map data in the Twitter bot, just ask for your nearest postbox, supermarket, recycling, telephone, toilets, or even your nearest peak! I got the following earlier so looks like I’ll need to keep my legs crossed while I drive over!

Directions from l19 to closest (the closest toilet) :: M62 > M6 > A534 (Old Mill Road)

Lastly, in my previous blog posting I asked whether anyone was interested in logging their position by DNS, a few people said they would be so I’m going to look into doing something with this soon, keep your eye on my blog for more information…

Technorati tags: iphone, hackdaylondon, multimap, events, twitter, upcoming