Turn back time in Google Earth

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Google Earth has had an “historical imagery” feature since back in 2009 (I wrote a bit about it in 2010), but they recently updated the web version of Google Earth to have an animated 3D version of changes to the planet. Here is a video they created that shows what it can do:

The feature is intended to show the impact of climate change and how humans are impacting the earth, but you can view this historical imagery for any location on earth, including your own city. Here is a short gif showing how Dubai has grown and changed in over the past 37 years:

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It’s quite a fascinating thing to explore. You can do it right now, in your browser, by going to g.co/timelapse.

Explore “from cave paintings to the internet” on Google Maps

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteHistoryOfInformation.com has just put out a very powerful new map that lets you explore famous locations in history around the world.  You can select a category, such as “art”, “music”, “telegraph” or dozens of others, then see pins placed on the map to show noteworthy events related to that category — going back many thousands of years.

cave-paintings

Check it out for yourself at www.historyofinformation.com/maps-simple/

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or learn more about it over on Google Maps Mania

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Google Maps coming back to Windows Phone “soon”

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Reading Time: < 1 minutegoogle-mapsLate yesterday, Google cut off in-browser access to Google Maps for Windows Phone users. The reason, according to Google:

“IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality. As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users.”

While they still have no plans to build a native Maps app for Windows Phone, this block is expected to be lifted soon to at least give those users access to it via the browser.

More details on this story are available over on TechCrunch

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A social network in Street View

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe’ve seen attempts at building a social network inside of Google Earth, such as YoubeQ, and now we have one that’s built entirely in Google Street View.

Wallit allows you to create a virtual “wall” anywhere on earth that you’d like, which others can then come write on.

The twist is that you need to be physically near the wall in order to write on it, which means you need the iPhone application in order to make much use of it.  You can browse walls on their website, but can only interact with them if you’re mobile.  Other mobile applications are coming “soon”, for what that’s worth.

You can learn more at wallitapp.com.

(via Google Maps Mania / Street View Funny)

The Google “Maps Cube” game is released

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After teasing it months ago, Google has finally released the “Maps Cube” game, and it’s pretty slick.  You roll a ball through various city streets to reach various goals, and you’re timed for your effort.  It’s fairly simple, and the interface is very slick.

The game requires that you use Google Chrome, but our stats show that most of you are already. 🙂

You can play the game at PlayMapsCube.com.  Have fun!

(via Google Maps Mania)

Amazing new photo tours in Google Maps

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteGoogle has just added a great new feature to Google Maps called “photo tours”, which feels a lot like Microsoft’s PhotoSynth

but taken to a whole new level. Here’s a video showing how they work:

To try them for yourself, check out a famous site such as Trevi Fountain or St. Mark’s Basilica

.  To learn more about how these tours were created you can read this entry on the Google Lat Long Blog.

More aerial views; National Geographic app; Google Maps for the indoors

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteA few cool things to point you toward today:

More Cities get “Aerial View” in Google Maps — Portland, OR and Sacramento and Oakland, CA all have new “bird’s eye” imagery from Google.

National Geographic launches iPhone app — It allows a variety of mapping sources, styles and other cool stuff.

Micello Launches “Google Maps for the Indoors” — This thing could be very cool if they can expand their coverage.  They have “over 250” maps so far, but none on the eastern half of the US.

Bing releases iPhone app with nice Maps implementation

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Reading Time: 2 minutesMicrosoft just released the “Bing” application for iPhone and it is a solid effort.  It was voice search that is similar to the Google app, and Maps implementation that is similar to Google Maps on the phone.

It’s a free app, so it’s certainly worth downloading and trying out.  Chris Pendleton has a nice writeup of it on the Bing Community blog, where he highlights some the new features on it.  Most of the features are similar to the pre-installed Google Maps

, but the voice search in Bing Maps is a slick feature that Google Maps doesn’t have.  The rest of the features are almost identical to the Google Maps app.

So which should you use? It depends what you do with it.  In my case, I typically use it for real-time traffic.  I’ll occasionally do a search on it, but usually just want to see which which interstate I should avoid.  Below is a side-by-side look at the two apps showing real-time traffic around Atlanta.  Google Maps is on the left, Bing on the right:

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It’s not even close!  Bing has all kinds of shading and blurring, which looks very nice, but makes it a pain to see what the colors are.  Is that a yellow, or the road color?  Is that orange in there?  It’s quite a mess.

Google’s may look more childish, but it’s far easier to see.  If I want a quick look at the traffic, I’ve got it.

The Bing app is pretty great, and overall I’m very impressed with it.  However, I’ll keep using Google Maps (for now), simply because it does a better job for what I need.

Microsoft teams with Navteq to expand their Streetside coverage

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteWhen Microsoft launched Streetside a few days ago (a direct competitor to Google’s StreetView), I wondered how they could possibly catch up with the huge amount of coverage that Google already has in place.  Their answer: Navteq.

Navteq has vehicles on the road all the time, collecting road data (speed limits, bridge heights, etc).  Microsoft plans to “strap a few cameras on their vehicles to record some photos”.  It certainly seems like a great way to start playing catch-up.  I still imagine it’ll be quite a while until they have anywhere close to as much imagery as Google, but this gives them a solid plan to start gaining some ground.

They also revealed that they’ll be doing monthly releases of new Streetside imagery, similar to their monthly aerial/satellite releases.  Those releases tend to be rather impressive is their coverage, so we’ll see if their Streetside releases can match that.

Like most of these kinds of battles, the winner will be you.  Both companies will work hard to add better features and greater coverage, and we get to reap the benefits.  Kinda nice. 🙂

Switzerland takes Google to court over StreetView

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Reading Time: < 1 minuteWe told you a few months ago that Switzerland wasn’t pleased with the new StreetView imagery in their country.  Now they’re going to sue Google in an attempt to get the imagery removed.  Google intends to fight the case.

The first step will be interesting — Google may be required to remove the imagery

from Switzerland until a ruling is made.  The order has not come out yet, but could come soon.  Hanspeter Thuer, the federal data protection commissioner in Switzerland, has asked the tribunal to force Google to take the images offline.

The outcome of this case will certainly have huge ramifications on the legality of StreetView in the rest of the world.  Other countries have been displeased with it, and if Switzerland is successful in getting the imagery removed it could cause a small ripple effect to other countries.

This will certainly be a story to watch.