I have no clue why Google doesn’t try to formalize a relationship with this guy - nobody knows and understands Google Maps better than him.

While responding to an email about where yellowpages.ca traffic comes from, I did a bit of digging -

According to Alexa, YellowPages.ca gets 40% of its traffic from Google. Yelp clocks in at 54%, whereas a pure-SEO play like MerchantCircle comes in at 70%.

But if you check the keywords, you can see that YellowPages.ca’s traffic is dominated by synonyms of yellow pages. The other two cannot claim as such (in fact, according to Alexa, the #2 keyword for MC is ‘boysfood’ a popular porn site).

Also according to Google, api.twitter.com has 20 million pages indexed. Pages which are identical to normal twitter.com/username pages.

Oops.

So to help out a friend, I’ve been playing around with the Twitter.com and its various API methods. When filing an IP whitelist request, what I thought would take days was pleasantly approved in 24 hours.

So while playing around with it, and their OAuth method, I came across a confusing bug - and after an hour of trying to figure out what the hell it was, I went to the forums. And it turned out to be a real nasty bug. A bug they deemed critical. And with that single click (the bug wasn’t just High Priority - it was Critical) I moved from the pantheon of the masses to the select few to make Twitter.com run around and try to figure out what went wrong.

But that really wasn’t the point. Twitter API support was fast. Blazing fast. Withing moments Doug and Matt were on it, and within 5 minutes of filing the bug it was claimed.

Twitter.com may be maddeningly slow at times, but I can see why so many apps around Twitter as springing up - those guys kick ass in making sure everything is being taken care of.

In the case of local, it is a combination of:

• Generating data in the format you need (x,y) coordinates with a related ‘value’ (the higher the value, the more obvious in the heatmap)
• Utilizing the data and being able to quickly and efficiently plot it onto an image
• The ability to create multiple levels and multiple images. For example, if using Google Maps, there are at least 5 levels that are important enough. Each tile image is 256×256, and each zoom increases the # of tiles by a factor of 4 (when you zoom in, what was one tile becomes 4). This is arguably the hardest part - eg if you only create by 256×256 grids, you miss location information just out of the grid. There might be a heavy heat-spot you might miss. And generating one big image is out of the question as you would exhaust memory. Using rough math, and exactly full zoom out, we have 12 256×256 grids. Another level of zoom, you end up with 48 images. Another zoom you end up with 192 images. Another zoom nets you 768, and one more gets you at 3072 images. One image that is 3072 tiles of 256×256 is 201,000,000 pixels. Even 768 tiles ends up being 50 million pixels. One image = no go.
• Conversion of (latitude,longitude) point into X,Y coordinates. In itself not difficult, but when you are trying to keep track of grids, and minimize CPU time spent, it becomes much more difficult.

Anyway - more than anything, this post was just on a challenge I’ve been working on. I haven’t solved it, but what I love is how much it brings local to life, and makes for another way of looking at data. For example, fast food joints in California:

Ideally I can get this damn fast enough that I can generate this in real-time and release as a lib. If not - oh well, a very interesting learning experience.

Alas for me, worst time possible. After blowing out my knee (13 days after I am still limping), the pedometer arrived two days later - and it has pushed me too far. A few days ago I cracked 5000 steps. Next day, needing to break the previous high, I cracked 6000. The three days since then? Extreme soreness due to over-exertion, and barely breaking 1500 (which really is not all that much).

Anyway - this post is more about lauding the connection between ‘offline’ devices and how connecting it to the computer is making it much more useful. If I was Omron, I would actually build out an online hub - now that would be awesome. Create groups, show your progress to others, etc.

O, and they really need to support Mac - come on!

Update: Well, just an update on the knee. Turns out my ACL is pretty much crushed, but the MRI will determine if it is completely torn (uhoh) vs 60-80% damaged. I’ve also greatly strained my inner-thigh ligament, and the meniscus in my knee. Over three weeks later and I’m still walking gimped. Humbug!

I had some large sites that had pretty low max rates (eg 1 page/sec), and it took me some figuring out how to get Google to go faster quicker - sitemap. By submitting a sitemap with a sizeable # of pages, we were able to boost from 1 page/sec to 2.5 pages/sec in roughly 96 hours.

Across all my sites Googlebot hits me at least a million times every day.

Think about it - what is synonymous with the internet? Sex. Travel. Weather. News. Sports. They are all very local oriented (sex - craigslist and AdultFriendFinder … whose affiliate managers email me twice a day ugh).

Really - the point of this post is for you to try to see the local aspect of your day to day life. The internet is a woven tapestry of local connections - but too often we see the finalized product, not the individual (local) links that bring it all together.

I will come back to this.