Mapalist evolved from a simple wedding website enabler created for some friends into a Google mashup solution used by tens of thousands of folks across the globe. Here’s the story…
Back in 2007, some friends asked us to create a site for their wedding; something that we begrudgingly agreed to do. Right around the same time, we attended a Google developer conference and got excited about the potential of leveraging Google APIs for both work-related and personal projects. The timing couldn’t have been better.
We put what we learned to use. It started with a simple map on the wedding website that showed the RSVP status of those invited – green pins for those that would attend, red pins for those that could not make it, and blue pins for those that had not yet responded. As RSVP cards came in, the couple updated their Google Sheet with the responses and this, in turn, automatically updated the map.
At this point, we went a bit overboard (from a wedding website perspective). We started creating maps to visualize the meal preferences of each guest (imagine a map with cows, chickens, and fish), bride vs. groom-side attendees, friends vs. family, singles vs. couples…and the list goes on.
And this is how mapalist, a simple, codeless wizard for creating and maintaining customized maps, was born…
Tens of thousands of users and hundreds of thousands of maps later, here we are, still plugging away. Brian takes care of all the technical stuff and I, The Map Commissioner, handle user support.
Thank you e-mails and donations trickle in from around the world as people in Norway and The Netherlands, New York and New Zealand, Nebraska and Nepal create and share maps. This is what makes us smile and keeps the site going – so please keep those coming!
Thanks greatly for giving our solution a try - we hope you find it useful.
Happy mapping,
Benjy
The Commish
