Lennart Moltrecht’s Website

FriendMap is my first Facebook Application. It creates a zoomable world map for all your friends. Now you can see who lives where, who moved currently and how big the distance between you and a friend actually is!

The application features complete profile integration with boxes, tabs and feed stories and fully supports the Facebook user interface with invitations, notifications and so on. Thus it feels as if it were part of Facebook and not an external application.

Go to the FriendMap Facebook Application | Visit About Page

Further Information

The application is based on PHP and JavaScript. When a user creates a FriendMap, the addresses of all friends are send to the Geohash Geocoding Service in order to aquire the geographical location. When the user wants to view the map, a custom map is created using the Google Maps API and fed with the location aquired earlier. This process uses Ajax, so the user experiences a very smooth process of creation.

Creation of a Friend Map

The Geocoding process usually needs one second, so the first creation of a FriendMap takes depending on the amount of your friends up to five minutes.

Notify missing friends

Friends who didn’t enter an address into their Facebook profile or whose city can’t be found are marked and can be shown and notified in the “Notify missing friends” tab.

Grouping

Friends who live in the same city are grouped together so that the map won’t be too chaotic.

Friends’ Friend Maps

There is also a function to see the FriendMap of your friends who also installed this application.

Profile integration

The user can also integrate the FriendMap into his profile either as a box or a special tab. In the profile tabs and boxes, no dynamic code (using JavaScript) is allowed, so the Google Maps API can’t be used. Therefore the application creates a custom JPG image showing a non-interactive map. This map can also be embedded in forum posts, etc.

I hope you like this application and install it to your Facebook account. Please give me feedback!