Yahoo! Local & Maps Blog

August 29th, 2006 was an exciting day for us; it was the day after Flickr first announced their Geotagging feature using the Yahoo! Maps API, and they had exceeded their first month projection of 1 million geotagged photos in a single day. It goes to show that putting pictures and places together go hand-in-hand like peas and carrots, Bonnie and Clyde… You get the idea.

Today Flickr released two new maps-related features. The new Flickr Places pages will take some of the 30+ million publicly geotagged photos already uploaded and organize them into key themes for over 100,000 locations. Each Places page features interesting photos and photographers, related Flickr Groups, and the tags that make that area unique.

The maps page itself gets a great upgrade as well, with an improved world map where people can easily view popular and up-to-date themes. Clicking on any of these hot tags will take you to a selection of current photos from that area, tagged with more detailed information. This will provide a great visual lens into the latest interesting things happening around the world.

These new features further demonstrate our commitment to a global platform and will be available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, and traditional Chinese.

Michael lawless

Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps

Real estate is the ultimate local business. That’s why our friends at Yahoo! Real Estate are always focused on making their products as local as possible. Recently, their launch of a home loan rate finder that can search for the best local rates caught our eye. With all the buzz around mortgages and real estate, house hunters and home owners alike are looking for tools to help them better navigate the market. So whether you’re buying a new home, refinancing, or pulling out equity, this is a great new tool to find the most competitive offers right in your area.

This comes on the heels of a completely upgraded home loans research section, where home owners and prospective buyers hungry for information can leverage tons of mortgage calculators (i.e. ever wonder how much that million dollar home would cost you per month?), see the latest rate trends and learn the ABCs of getting a loan. In addition, users can connect with a local mortgage broker through a new module leveraging our Yahoo! Local search API.

We hope you find these tools useful. Happy house hunting.

Michael Lawless
Sr. Product Manager, Yahoo! Maps