I want to post about something that I have used personally and found extremely valuable.

As a young professional in a big city looking for an affordable place to rent, I frequented the ever popular craigslist.com to hopefully find my future living space.

The problem was that although I had some specific criteria (location, cost, # of rooms etc.), craigslist’s interface isn’t intended for such queries and I wasted a lot of my time jumping pages trying to qualify the posting as something that interested me (location mainly).

So, when a friend told me about www.housingmaps.com, it changed my life (at that moment at least).

Housingmaps.com has a single, simple purpose — It uses Google Maps API to overlay all craigslist housing data on an interactive map with pushpins designating properties that match your criteria. If you click on a property, images of the house will pop-up (if there are any associated with it) and a link back to the original post on craigslist is available.

I had heard how google opened up their maps application to allow the public to present their own sets of data on their map interface…. but I wasn’t particularly interested until I needed such a service!

While I was still merely accessing the same information previously available to me, this new method of presenting it made all the difference. This is a great example of how the same data can be presented in a different manner to create fantastic value.

Visit Google Maps API at http://www.google.com/apis/maps/ – you can put google maps on your own website

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