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Fatdoor is an upcoming social network that's all about location. Instead of creating your network of friends based on interests or real-life relationships, the creators of Fatdoor want you to use the service to get a better feel for your neighborhood and what's going on around you.

The system works by slurping in local business and residential listings, and placing them on a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. While the businesses get pinpoint-accuracy, residential listings are clumped together in a general area, until users decide to claim the house or building as their own. Each user gets their own … Read more

Here at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference, one of the few and the proud gadgets on the exhibition floor is 3Dconnexion's SpaceNavigator mouse. Calling it a mouse might be an insult though, it feels more like an airplane steering yolk.

Launched in November, the mouse integrates with big Web maps services like Google Maps and Microsoft's Live Maps. Users can navigate the maps with very little effort, pushing, pulling, and twisting the circular handle. I spent about five minutes with it on the show floor, and walked away from the booth dangerously close to purchasing one.… Read more

Imagine if you will a room full of several hundred developers, journalists, and curious onlookers sitting together listening to the sounds of monkeys. That was the scene here at Where 2.0 during a demo for Wild Sanctuary, a project that presents sound clips of nature as a layer on Google Earth.

Users can explore various sounds, and see their placement and contextual information on the map. What's interesting about these "soundscapes" is that they can show the difference in an area before and after environmental impact both with visual maps and sound as. Several examples were … Read more

Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.

Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to … Read more

This morning Google added Street View, an all new way to browse Google Maps. Launching with five major cities, Street View joins satellite and traffic maps as new ways to view geography. When in an area with a Street View, users can toggle the mode to navigate within a 3-D photograph using their mouse or keyboard shortcuts. Users get their own "person" that shows which direction you're looking at.You can also just click and drag them to new locations. The experience is a mix between Quicktime's VR environment and Microsoft Live Labs' PhotoSynth project since … Read more

I'm here at O'Reilly's Where 2.0 conference here in San Jose, which is about to kick off. At last night's Launch Pad event, four new services launched.

Fatdoor made its official alpha launch. Originally slated for a release at last month's Web 2.0 Expo, the service opened its doors for people interested in testing the service on their way to making it publicly available. The service touts itself as being a "neighborhood-based community social network," and a place to find local people or events. We'll try to get a hands-on … Read more

Today, Swivel is adding a new geography view to its data-sharing service. Users will now be able to view data containing city or country information in a variety of different ways, using integrated Google Maps.

Geographic data is represented as a heat map, which will display data as darkened and lightened areas--like you'd see on a weather map. You can also turn your own data set into a one of these maps.

Like other data sets on the service, users will still be able to compare multiple sets of data at the same time, as long as the data … Read more