What the heck is this?
It's an extremely bare-bones web page.

Very funny.
OK. It's Step One of generating a Google Map of all your LJ Friends (at least, those whose locations can be found).

How?
Just type your LJ username into the box above and click Submit. Then you'll have to wait awhile - just this one time, though - for the next page to load. Awhile as in minutes, maybe ten or more if you have a huge friendslist or lots of people are hitting the site. Once the page loads, just click on the link at the bottom, et voila, there's your map, which you can view anytime with no more waiting required.

I want to know more!
Oh. One of those. Well then. This is what's going on: When you submit this form, you trigger a Python program that runs all around the Internet (well, to LJ and Google, and Multimap if Google fails) getting location information from all your friends' LJ info pages and converting that to latitude and longitude when possible. This takes a long time, but only has to be run once. Then when you go to the friendsmap page, it loads this information into a Google Map to be shown to you.

I got to the map, but there's nothing on it!
Click on one of the "friendings" links. Double-click anywhere on the map to center on that point. Or click and drag to move around. Select Satellite to switch to a satellite-photo view, and use the scale-bar on the left to zoom in and out.

Can I see an example?
Sure.

It isn't working!
Hmm. It's a beta release, but it should be working OK at least most of the time. Send me (rezendi) an email or a comment with details.

And who are you, exactly?
I'm an ex-techie - turned thriller novelist, of all things - who wrote this to make the world a better place for fun.

Known issues:

• Like I warned ya, the data collection is slooooooow.
• The map too can be slow for large friendslists; this is partly due to my code, which I can eventually optimize, and partly due to Google Maps, which I can't. Zooming out on very large friendslists may kill your browser.
• Currently uses Google Maps, and if that fails Multimap, to convert place name to latitude-longitude. Google is surprisingly bad at this; eg it doesn't understand Australian states at all, and doesn't return a generic loation when given a "foreign" nation. Multimap is better, but there are still lacunae in its data. Worse yet, sometimes Google Maps thinks it knows a location, and is dead wrong. Try typing "Perth,Western Australia,Australia" or "Lanzarote,Spain" into its search box, and see what you get; the answers may surprise you
• If nonspecific location data is given - eg "California,United States" - the location will not show up (except in the "Unfound" list.) I don't really think of this as a bug, but rather as a reasonable way to handle bad data.
• Because it uses multiple sources for latitude-longitude data, locations that seem obviously identical to humans (eg "Montreal,Quebec,Canada" and "Montreal, PQ,Canada") may have slightly different lat/long coordinates; you might have to zoom in to see all your friends in a given city. This is particularly true for location names with non-ASCII characters, for reasons too tedious to get into.
• Data is cached for one month (otherwise the map would be super-slow every time, and Google/LJ would probably cut off access) which means changes to your friendslist, or to friends' locations, won't show up for some time unless you recreate the map with the "Regenerate all location data from scratch" button checked.
• Crack teams of highly trained orangutans are working day and night to resolve these problems, banana supply permitting.

Issues fixed since last release:

• Added an option to force the recalculation of all locations from scratch, rather than using the locally cached data. Note that checking this box will slow down performance a whole lot.
• Fixed the "Data as of" date
• Locations with ampersands and slashes no longer kill the map (they're converted to | though)
• Now uses Multimap if Google doesn't understand the location
• Now handles locations with non-ASCII characters in their name
• Added the "kick back and have a beer" intermediate page so it's easier to figure out when it's processing and when it's done
• Tries to do some concatenation of places with similar names that are very close together
• When you click on a marker, or select "Unknown" or "Unfound", user names are better formatted