Jonah told me he had a spare ticket to yesterday's geo API hackathon at the Google headquarters last Thursday afternoon. I'd long been curious to see the fabled interior of the New York Googleplex, and the event also offered a chance to catch up with how NYC developers have been using with geospatial data. New York is, after all, a location-obsessed town.

Jonah told me he had a spare ticket to yesterday's "geo API hackathon" at the NYC Google headquarters last Thursday afternoon. I'd long been curious to see the fabled interior of the New York Googleplex, and the event also offered a chance to catch up with how NYC developers have been using with geospatial data. New York is, after all, a location-obsessed town.

Mano Marks and Roman Nurik, who work on the geo api team, kicked off the event with a brief presentation. Their efforts currently focus on integrating Google Maps and Google Earth; one recent milestone is the introduction of the Google Earth browser plugin. Widespread access Google Earth, in all of its 3-D glory, from a browser - even one on a mobile device-- makes possible projects like this map of a college library in Singapore, in which a call number brings up the book's shelf location in a 3-D model of the building.

I spent the afternoon running through a couple of tutorials for the Google Maps API, which I hadn't used for some time and has apparently gotten easier to use. I sat with a number of developers from the New York Times, who've been doing great work adding Times articles to G. Earth by tagging them with location data. I even got to meet Matthew Bloch, the genius behind the Times' Electoral Explorer, which we all spent Election Night obsessing over. See his site, maps.grammata.com, for a number of other intriguing mashups.

Other guests presented in the evening. It's gradually getting easier to track and plot ordinary cell phones' locations, and several presenters were using both Maps and Earth to help analyze this data. Steve Bull is using this development to come up with some interesting games, which is an intriguing departure from the obvious applications of surveillance and marketing. Others were exploring the possibility of extracting aggregate information about the schedules of commuters who volunteered to share the whereabouts of their cellphones over a several-week period. I can certainly imagine a social science class sending out a dozen students, each with a cellphone broadcasting its coordinates, on various "missions", and then gathering to analyze the resulting data.

In short, the growing availability of geographical data, the increasing cleverness of the software that allows us to visualize it, and the ever-shrinking size of the gadgets that make it available to us, have only begun to change the way we live in, and study, this city.