When the Launchpad API first came out one of the first things I noticed was that it was possible to set your latitude and longitude via the API. After seeing this I remembered some book called Cryptonomicon where one of the protagonist’s has their geolocation in their email signature and thought it would be neat to update my geolocation in Launchpad as I traveled. Alas, I wasn’t able to get setLocation to work at all with the API.
When I was working on the Launchpad team at the EPIC in July I remembered the issue I was having and discovered that I was doing it wrong. I needed to use launchpad.people[’brian-murray’].setLocation() and not launchpad.me.setLocation(). Then Google Maps were removed from people pages like mine and I was sad again.
Surely, there is is a happy ending to this sad tale?
Indeed, Santa has arrived a bit early and brought me a Launchpad Greasemonkey script that displays Google Maps on Launchpad user pages again. It is now available in firefox-lp-improvements. So please set your location to interesting and approximate places!
Nice. It would be even neater to use OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps. It might encourage LP users to contribute to OSM