I'm not too impressed with the "treasure map" style maps of my local neighbourhood though, apart from the names in a different font, an arbitrary icon here and there, there's hardly any details at all, not even the larger roads are complete.
None of the ogres or trolls are mapped in my neighborhood either, nor are there any ships falling off the map in to a pit of monsters, lame. Although I do give them points for the flatness of the map.
I followed this to a geometer's compass at 29.14,129.19, but there doesn't seem to be any other coordinates. (One before that was at 24.3775,124.1555.)
I found that, a red sword, and a red coin which didn't have coordinates. Tried following the lines they made but didn't have any luck.
It's also weird that there are large numbers sometimes and red numbers sometimes, they definitely mean something. From the video they posted this won't be an easy puzzle to solve.
I think 37.89,-61.96 is actually next, although it does take you to your location after that. The trick is to see the comma after the nine, indicating to enter the numbers in the other order.
This is such a little thing that is going to be absolutely great for my nieces and nephews.
When getting directions, the markers and line between the start and end points are the same. They should add in a dashed line and a big black X for the destination as soon as possible :-)
A weekend trip to a national park can be made that much more fun by having a family treasure hunt with the kids in the back seat "navigating" the way.
The coordinates that are indicated in the landmarks are a bit hard to read sometimes, and you have to piece them together. The skull in New York is pointing to: (-15.36, 15.90). After searching for that location, zoom in on the green arrow, and you should see a piece of ham that is pointing to: (-21.53, 46.05)
The coordinates at the sword that comes next are also ambiguous. You have to infer that the 9 in the handle is indicating that the first number is 9.81.
any thoughts how you would implement this? To apply the sepia filter to the street view images would double the storage used for all the images, which is huge! Alternatively to apply the sepia filter each time a image is loaded would add a lot of load to the servers, especially if the joke is spread around the world? So some kind of caching would be in place? Or is it done in browser with the flash plugin which would be the most boring option, but also the most plausible... (that would also explain why the webgl version does not work)
The world map is just images at different zoom levels with an algorithm that adds trees, that would not be a problem I guess?
Guys, we have started a map with all the red end points. It's here http://bit.ly/123SO9w . Feel free to had your end points . so far we have two medals, a ring, two guns/revolver, a rope, a snake, a compass. It seems that some object have the shape of their initial letter (snake = S, rope = R)
So I found 2 red letters (C at -28.30,-57.30; M at 34.61,135.73), as well as three red signs (- sign at 35.11,-75.98, 9 at 76.50,-24.01, and 1 at 68.92,40.64) so there’s probably a super secret location given by the red coordinates but I don’t know what the letters mean.
Apparently, all of the big red letters at the end of the trails spell out "APRIL FOOLS". The smaller red letters and numbers spell "MMC-900913", which is a reference to last year's 8-bit map.
When unzooming completely (using Opera), France and Great Britain are conjoined twins. And so on for Morocco and Spain, Denmark and Norway, Sicily and the rest of Italy...
They shut down Google Reader then put up a pointless map hack. Recognize that putting this together took a bunch of people's time and energy, not to mention processing power, server load, etc. All reasons for shutting down Reader.
What is the message Google is communicating to everyone? "We're still fun, just less useful?" Sorry if I don't have room to appreciate their "corporate whimsy" anymore.
Reader was based on a very old Google platform that was no longer viable. Porting Reader to the new infrastructure essencially meant rebuilding the entire thing as a new project. The amount of work does not even compare to an April Fools hack by the Maps team.
Can we please stop using everything that Google does as an excuse to complain about Reader?
This riff is getting really old. People used Google Reader. Google took it away for its own reasons. It was Google's to take away. If anything, this creates a slight inconvenience to its users but a huge opportunity for someone else to come along and innovate.
Especially in a company the size of Google, there is no mutual exclusivity between working on Product X and implementing minuscule feature Y.
The comparison is moot (different scales/time and effort). Also, don't trivialize the importance of having fun and being able to do so in a fairly large company.
As in fools that forget that their couch is not the center of the earth? Wake up, it's April 1st in some parts of the world now. As an exercise in self-education, go find out which.
Yes, published USA time, but most of the world's population is living in April 1st now (India, China, Japan - all Asia essentially, Australia and so on). So it's not only Iran.
nice easter egg : following the "treasure hunt" leads to red letters spelling out "APRIL FOOLS".
Along each of the trails leading to the red letters, there are also hidden letters that spell out "MMC-900913" (a reference to last years google maps april fools)
