Lively - Googles 3D Virtual World

Just came across Lively.com which developed by Google, creates a virtual 3D world similar to SecondLife.

I haven't tested out Lively yet, since I'm running Ubuntu and it only supports Windows at the moment. In one of their blog posts however we can gather that Lively is well integrated with the Web. They have widgets that allows visitors - with Lively software installed - to jump into a Lively room embedded in a webpage.

By contrast I believe SecondLife offer APIs that offers a REST interface as well as other network level interfacing. Here is a SecondLife Facebook Application.

I'm wondering if Google will offer the same level of integration with their Lively 3D world. Would make fun Mashups.

Google Maps Geocoding API Launched, Finally!

Looks like Google finally releases a (edit: an improved) Geocoding service for the Google Maps API. Try it out here. I wonder how compares to the Yahoo Maps API Geocoding service that has been available for some time.

edit. Google Maps API has had geocoding available since June 11th, 2006 according to their blog article "Geocoding at Last". They've since then added geocoding for the UK, Australia and New Zealand.

It would be interesting to see a street/address based geocoding service from OpenStreetMap.org. From data alone it is obvious that it would have more world coverage then Google Maps or Yahoo Maps Geocoding. At the moment they only offer geocoding based on "geographical object names" with help from Geonames.org. It should be quite trivial to write a street/address geocoding algorithm using the OpenStreetMap.org data. Half the world lives outside the data covered by Google and Yahoo! Geocoding - the exotic half.

Twitter API and AJAX

Twitter is a very exciting service. I've been playing around with a twitter mashup in my spare time that I will post here.