Breaking News With Flex and Google Maps

The apps featured on Adobe Flextv’s “App of the Week” have so far remained obscure. Few links—forget reviews—are discoverable. From now on, I shall try to cover these apps every Friday here.

fo.reca.st’s Breaking News Map was featured in Flextv’s second episode.

The RIA gets news from Reuters using Reuters Spotlight and maps these items with locations on a world map powered by Google Maps Flash API. A brief summary of the news item is displayed along with a link to the article itself. Built using Flex, BreakingNewsMap runs smoothly and gives us three controls: runtime of the app (in minutes), 9 channels to choose from, and 5 speed levels.

(Click image for greater resolution.)

I can see the future versions of the app with additional news feeds and channels to choose from. Or how about a search term instead of the channels? An Adobe AIR app would be even better.

But the one feature I would like the most is a location control, at the country level. It would be especially useful for channels like top news, politics, and entertainment. It might appear that there won’t be much of the cool scrolling around the map in that scenario, but the additional news feeds should take care of the problem.

fo.reca.st is a website that specializes in web 2.0 surveys. Using their freely availabe surveys (currently in beta), you can design online surveys, collect responses, analyze them, and present the survey results.