How can I map my Gmail contacts' physical location in Google Maps?

Question

Is there a way plot groups of my Gmail contacts' physical locations in Google Maps?

OS is Windows Vista.

Answer 1

Umm, Google Latitude? But of course it needs the contacts to have a mobile device with GPS and their permission.

Answer 2

Being able to sync a Contact Group with a custom Google Map seems like such an obvious feature or easy add-on to program, that I'm amazed it hasn't been done.

There's a workaround that is annoying, but it works and after set-up requires manual maintenance. It uses Google Map's KML import feature. KML is an XML based format for listing mappable addresses and map coordinates.

Steps:

1. Get the KML structure used by Google Maps

   • create a custom map
   • add a few addresses
   • edit to a format that you like
   • export as KML file

2. Export the Contacts Group that you want to map in Outlook .csv format, which is the best format to use with Excel.

3. Build the KML file - It's pretty easy to automate using Excel concatenation. Just keep in mind that XML tags are usually on separate lines for readability, but they can be kept on one line. The master tag for each record is <Placemark>, so each line should start and end with <Placemark>...</Placemark>.

4. Import into new Google Map.

This is a good way to first set-up the map. If you have very frequent changes, you can import more KML files, but infreequent changes are more easily accomplished by directly editing a map.

Now only if someone would step-up and create a sync utility! sigh