Google Maps of the Week

Pin Drop is a great way to bookmark your favorite locations on a Google Map.

Have you ever found somewhere cool and thought 'I must come back here' and then later forgotten where it was? Or have you tried to tell friends about somewhere but you couldn't quite remember where it was? Pin Drop helps you to keep track of your favorite locations.

Saving locations to Pin Drop is very easy. You just need to add a pin to a Google Map. You can tag and color-code your pins so it easy to quickly find all your favorite cafes, galleries or shops when you need to find them.

Pin Drop is also available as an iPhone app so you can access your saved location when you are out on the town and you can also bookmark new locations as you find them on your travels.


Pinwheel allows users to pin notes to a Google Map. The note can be about anything, from a reminder to pick up a cartoon of milk to advice about the best dish to try at a restaurant.

You can browse locations and view your own notes, the notes of people you follow or notes left by all Pinwheel users. If you see a note that you like, you can add it to your favorites by clicking on the heart icon.

Users can organise their notes into 'sets'. By using sets it is easy to create your own map of your favourite bars, cafes or anything else that you want to collect.

When you are out and about you can use the Pinwheel mobile page http://m.pinwheel.com/ to access your saved notes or find notes left by others around you (an iPhone app is also coming soon).


Livehoods is an interesting project to remap city neighborhoods by ignoring the traditional geographical boundaries and instead looking at human social interactions.

By analysing over 18 million Foursquare check-ins Livehoods has created three city maps with new neighborhoods based on the patterns of the groups of people that check-in to Foursquare venues.

So far there are three Livehoods maps: New York City, San Francisco, Pittsburgh. The dots on the maps represent different check-in locations. Groups of nearby dots of the same color form a Livehood. The groups are determined when the same people check-in to two nearby locations.