Google Maps
I was trying to think of a smart title for this post, but gave up because it doesn’t need one - Google Maps is already smart enough.
Earlier on in our project I asked each of the team to create a map showing where we’d been as a team since the project had started. My aim was to show that there were different ways of describing the same thing and that there wasn’t necessarily a right or wrong way.
The first suprise I got was that half of the team interpreted the exercise as needing to show where we had been geographically and the other half as where we had been mentally as a team. Anyway.
Stew created a map showing the physical places that we had visited using Google Maps. And although Stew is always very enthusiastic about how easy technology is (”It’ll take me a day to do that”), I reckon he took longer to make his map (get an API, create a web page, write some HTML, re-write some HTML, upload the web page etc., etc.) than I did to create this morning. It took me 10 minutes (yes, really) to create four markers with a bit of HTML and to create a line from our offices to the cafe in the nearby park.
This was made possible (not that I haven’t gone through the whole rigmarole of creating one before!) by the release of the functionality on Goole Maps at the beginning of April. Included in My Maps is the ability to add create a KML file from any data that you’ve added using My Maps. What this means is that in one step any map that you create using My Maps is available as an overlay on Google Earth (you just need somewhere to store the KML file so that other people can use it). What Google has done here is, at a stroke, made is so simple to create maps that anyone can do it and so add another raft of customers that they can monetise.
Even before My Maps was released, Google has been slowly adding features to Google Maps. In February, outlines of buildings appeared on maps for some cities in the US and in April these became nearly three dimensional (click on The Economist Group (New York) on the ), as reported by Google Maps Mania. At the same time, some buildings got names and train and subway stops appeared (I have to say that the previous lack of these on UK maps makes Google Maps far inferior to StreetMap as a way of finding your way around and they still don’t show up outside central London).
I guess the question now is, how far will Google go? Will they risk incurring the wrath of other commercial organisations by adding data at a more granular level or leave it to people to do their own thing, like the excellent subway map on onNYTurf (go to the highest zoom level on a station in Manhattan to see what I mean)?
Way out! I can see the exits (they’re the small red steps)
In the background, meanwhile, some other neat things have started to creep in, such as the undocumented ability to zoom in a bit more when at the highest zoom level when in Satellite View as noted by Google Blogscoped.
I guess that only time will tell whether Google will someday own the Earth (or at least a virtual representation of it)….
