Google Coordinate API: Empowering the Team

Greg Bates, October 22nd, 2012

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Google Coordinate API enables mobile work teams to do four simple things that, when done by everyone on the team, can propel productivity: communicate, see everyone’s location on a map, pinpoint and assign jobs, and notify and update each other constantly.

An introductory claymation/paper animation video gives the enlightening example of workers on a wind farm, with people coordinating to fix one busted wind turbine after another. (Not a subliminal dig at wind energy, I presume.)

The point, according to the narrator, is that: “When entire teams use Google Maps Coordinate, the right people get the right assignments at the right time. More jobs get completed per day.”

According to Google’s APIs Explorer website, Google Maps Coordinate API does 6 things:

1. coordinate.customFieldDef.list:  Retrieves a list of custom field definitions for a team.
2. coordinate.jobs.get: Retrieves a job, including all the changes made to the job.
3. coordinate.jobs.insert: Inserts a new job. Only the state field of the job should be set.
4. coordinate.jobs.list:Retrieves jobs created or modified since the given timestamp.
5. coordinate.jobs.patch: Updates a job. Fields that are set in the job state will be updated. This method supports patch semantics.
6. coordinate.jobs.update: Updates a job. Fields that are set in the job state will be updated.

According to Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, Coordinate, which is for sale, not free,  overlaps with two other newly-released Google APIs, Google Maps Tracks API and Google Maps Geolocation API, but Maps Coordinate is the “full-blown tracking service for businesses.”

“The Maps Coordinate API exposes job creation, listing, and update functionality through a RESTful web service,” according to the Google coordinate website. User parameters are submitted on a web form. For authentication purposes, all requests to the Maps Coordinate API are accompanied by an OAuth 2.0 token.

Google Coordinate joins other Google Maps APIs, which, the company claims, are used by over 800,000 developers worldwide.