This is cool...

I wonder if GitHub has analytics about how many of their users use these features? Because I have a short list of features I would love from GitHub (things like a UI for rebasing merges of Pull Requests, or the ability to do merge --squash) and I can't be the only one who's wanted these things. My point is, why doesn't GitHub implement more git-related features instead of cool visualization features?

Because people work on what interests them and that apparently doesn't.

http://www.fastcolabs.com/3020181/open-company/inside-github...

This is cool, but, as a paying Github customer that's trying to use GH to manage a team of developers, I would sure rather see them working on tools to help me manage lots of branches and improve the code review tools. The current "network" tool is pretty useless and Pull Requests get weird quick once the re-work begins. I got psyched about GitHub because they were adding practical apps around using git to build code, and their focus at times seems to have drifted pretty far away from that mission.

The guys and gals at Github constantly add really cool stuff. Good on them for working so hard.

Agreed! I'm really curious to know what users are motivating them to put so much effort into this area though.

I've always thought that maybe this was related to Github's super-flat management structure, where as I understand it, people have a lot of choice as to what they work on.

In such a system, it seems pretty natural that you'd get a lot of people doing "cool" stuff...

Yep, that's the one.

I think it's the inverse, built features to encourage more users in this area.

This is a big advance for mapping and open data on GitHub!

Last year I was working with Boston and Cambridge to open their mapping data, and in addition to GitHub I was encouraging them to use GeoGit (geogit.org). Some of our projects (bike lanes added each year, buildings changed between 2010 and 2013 datasets & missing on OpenStreetMap, permits added each day) could now be shown in GitHub.

I don't think this is the end of GeoGit though... feature-by-feature changes and filtering available in GeoGit are important for 3rd-party databases to keep in sync with an authoritative dataset.

I'd love to see some improvements done around their plain old text based diffs, and merging.

Yeah, syntax highlighting would be awesome to start...

The style spec is a feature I have been waiting on for a long time. Does anyone know if there is a leaflet plugin out there for rendering styles based on the spec when adding a geojson layer?

Very impressive! I hope this is bringing us closer to the possible of New York Times-style maps for all of our datasets.