Nestoria Interview: Luis Cipriani
Luis Cipriani is the man behind the recently blogged about "If I dig a very deep hole where will I end up". After seeing his site I started to wonder if he had ideas for any similar practical applications to answer these kinds of pressing questions, so I go in touch with him to ask him and asked him some other questions in the process.
To give you some background Luis has been developing web applications and mashups for 5 years. His first mashup was done in 2005 just after Google Maps API was released. After some years working as consultant in a bank with software engineering, he decided to focus only on Web development and joined a Brazilian Startup to work in a social Question and Answer website and Blogblogs, the largest blog search engine in Brazil. Later, this Startup was joined with Editora Abril, a publishing company, and started to work as software engineer for a Research and Development area. Beyond mashups using data exposed in APIs, Luis' interests includes Real time web, RESTful with hypermedia, natural language processing, dynamic programming languages, XMPP and several other Web technologies.
Hi Luis, I came across you because of your cool map based site 'If I dig a hole". When did you come up with the idea? How much interest has it received and was it unexpected?
Just after Google Maps launched their API, I started trying to think of some simple application to test it. Then I remembered those TV cartoons that show a character digging or falling down in a hole and arriving on the other side of the world, with Chinese people, and so on. And I thought that would be great to be able to know the exactly place that I would end up if I dig a hole through Earth. The idea is completely nonsense, but I thought that everybody spends at least one day pondering this, and finally I could answer it for them, thanks to the API.
I coded for half an hour and created a poorly designed, but functional website (not the current one) and sent to some friends. One of them was Mike Pegg, author of Google Maps Mania, a blog that tracks Maps mashups and I ask him if he could publish something about my website (the email subject at the time was "Stupid application for Google Maps" :-)), and I put a Google Maps Mania link on my site. I forgot about the website for some days when I received an email from him (copied and pasted below):
"I suspect you must be getting some pretty serious traffic to your digging tool? A majority of my visits are coming from your site if you can believe it. Wow! :) Great job! :)"
I decided to take a look at the statistics and I was getting 30,000 visits a day, a lot of blogs were writing reviews (even a blog from a research group at Stanford University), the website was chosen one of the "55 ways to have fun with Google" in Philipp Lenssen's book, published in 2006. It was all pretty unexpected. I had to change the hosting, fix English typos, add Adsense, I had a lot of fun. Nowadays, the website doesn't get that kind of load, but it might have been the most profitable half hour of work that I've ever done :-)
Did you try and repeat your succes on other, similarly inquisitive sites?
Trying to repeat the success of the "digging" website, I came up with another one that answers the question: "If I walk in a straight line around the world, where will I pass?" Basically, the user chooses the coordinates, direction (or two coordinates) and the mashup will draw the path that he'd pass along if he was capable of walking huge distances. To improve the visualization, I used another API that shows interesting places around this path. It's quite fun to search for funny or interesting places along the path, but this site didn't have the success of the previous one.
In 2008 I worked in a project to map Brazilians Twitters users (www.tuitersfera.com.br), offering population distribution, state distribution statistics, all drawn in a Google Map. But this project was discontinued.
My last project using maps was a simple mashup combining Yahoo Query language and Yahoo Pipes with open public data to plot addresses of fruit markets in certain days of the weeks in my city, Sao Paulo.
And do you have any more ideas, or sites that you'd like to create but that there's not quite the technology for yet?
I don't think the possibility of not having the technology to build a specific map application is a limitation today. We face far more difficulties trying to source data from the Web than whilst creating an application that uses an obscure technology, because not all websites are designed to work as data providers, to offer APIs, or to be consumed externally by a robot. Sometimes they don't even offer a valid HTML for us to at least scrape the page. Another important question to answer before we use data is how reliable it is.
The main challenge when building a map visualization comes from mining and filtering the data so you can find the results you want to present. To improve this it would be great to see initiatives such as Linked Data, Semantic Web, RESTful with hypermedia becoming more successful. Or for APIs to be must-have functionality on all websites that manage data.
I'm very interested in the place where mapping and technology are converging, can you recommend to me any other mashups, sites or applications that explore this field that you have seen and loved?
I haven't kept a list of the map mashups or applications that I've seen and liked... As a web developer, I prefer to look for my inspiration in experiments with Google Maps, on the Programmable Web, on the Google Maps Mania blog and I also keep updated in new map APIs or new features in existent APIs.
What kinds of non-map based projects are you interested in?
I'm currently involved in the development of an open source RESTful with hypermedia library called Restfulie. I'm also very interested in Real Time Web applications, specially the ones that uses XMPP as message protocol. And any kind of sports related applications that improve the way an audience sees a game, with statistics, visualization, etc.
That sounds like another project that will keep a lot of people entertained. Thanks very much for speaking to us Luis, and Nestoria's sports fans will no doubt be keen to wish you well on any sports related endevours.
