If you’ve been following mySociety for a while, you’ll know that we have been interested in making maps that show commuting times for several years.

However, we’ve never made public a simple, free, useful version of our slidy-swooshy Mapumental journey times technology. Until today.

Today we pull the wraps off Mapumental Property , a house-hunting service covering England, Scotland and Wales, designed to help you work out where you might live if you want a public transport commute of a particular maximum duration. Have a go, and we guarantee you’ll find it an oddly compelling experience.

We think it’s a genuinely useful tool – especially since unlike some of the other players in this space, we’ve got all the different kinds of public transport, right across the whole of Great Britain. We hope that some of you will find it helpful when deciding where to live.

However, this launch doesn’t mean mySociety is bent on taking over the property websites sector. Mapumental Property isn’t a challenger to the likes of Rightmove, it’s a calling card – an advertisement for our skills – which we hope will help mySociety to attract people and organisations who want beautiful, useful web tools built for them.

In particular we’d like people interested in Mapumental to note that:

• We like to build attractive, usable web tools for clients of all kinds.
• We know how to use complex data to make simple, lovely things.
• We can do some mapping technology that others haven’t worked out yet.

If any of that is of interest, please get in touch, or read about our software development and consulting services.

I’d like to thank quite a few people for helping with this launch. Duncan Parkes was the lead developer, Matthew Somerville ably assisted. Jedidiah Broadbent did the design. The idea originally came from the late Chris Lightfoot, and me, Tom Steinberg. Francis Irving built the first version, and Stamen came up with the awesome idea of using sliders in the first place (and built some early tech). Kristina Glushkova worked on business development, and Zoopla’s API provides the property data. I’m also grateful to Ed Parsons of Google for very kindly giving us a hat tip when they built some technology that was inspired by Mapumental.  Thanks to everyone – this has been a long time coming.

We’ll follow up soon with a post about the technology – and in particular how we got away from using Flash. It has been an interesting journey.