The state of Google Maps

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It’s been quite a week for Google Maps.  Where 2.0 and the Google Developer Day last week brought a flurry of new announcements.   I’ll run through them all for you:

Driving directions for the API

You can now use driving directions on your API maps.  Not only can you do full directions, but you can capture each step and output it any way that you want, or you can include waypoints in there.  It’s quite powerful.

Google Mapplets

As Google puts it, it allows you to create a “mashup of mashups”.  Right now it’s kind of tucked away on their site, but you can find it here.  I liken it very much to the layers feature of Google Earth.  You can take seemingly unrelated content and layer it on top of one another to create a more useful map.  At the Developer Day they showed examples of real estate info, mixed with schools, mixed with crime data, mixed with local transit.  Having the other data available made the real estate info more useful.

As this feature gains popularity it will also become much more useful.

Street View

You’ve undoubtedly heard about this already.   Google just released “Street Views” for Google Maps.  It’s quite slick, allowing you to see tons of street-level imagery, but it’s so far only available in five cities (San Francisco, New York City, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami).  Mike Pegg at Google Maps Mania has a nice write-up about it.

AdSense Integration

Google announced this at Developer Day, but it’s still about a month away.  With just a couple extra lines of JavaScript, Maps mash-ups will be able to contain AdSense placemarks.  They’ll show up on the map automatically (such as the location of nearby hotels) and the developer will get paid if a user clicks through for more info — just like a normal AdSense ad.  The integration looks quite slick, so it’ll be interesting to see how this works once it’s released.

KML support

Google has been ramping up their support for KML files in maps, and that’ll be increasing a few weeks.  Right now, the maps will blow up if you give it more than a few hundred placemarks in a KML.  However, within “a couple weeks” you’ll be able to load massive numbers of files and Google will deal with it.  They’ll show the “most relevant” items when zoomed out, then include more and more as users zoom in.  It’s similar to how most mash-ups work now, but it’ll make the development of those mash-ups much easier, assuming the relevancy is worked out well.

There’s much to be excited about with Google Maps.  If I missed anything, please let me know.

The state of Virtual Earth

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I thought I’d start things out on here by talking about some recent insights and improvements to each of the three main topics on this blog – Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, Google Maps and Google Earth.

We’ll start with Virtual Earth.  If you haven’t used it in a few months, you need to go check it out again.  It is progressing at an amazing rate of speed.  Within just the last few weeks we’ve seen a new version be released (v5) as well as a TON of new data.

Version 5 offers some cool stuff. The most interesting to me is the info box – the description that pops up when you click an item.  You can now put any HTML in there that you want, which means forms, videos, photos, etc can all be seen in there.  This is also the case with Google Maps, but not with Google Earth where you are very limited on what you can put in there.

Their latest data update was also quite impressive.  According to their developer blog, they’ve added 11.5 terabytes of data!  This includes new high-res standard data, new bird’s eye data and a bunch of new cities in 3D.  It’s quite impressive.

All of that being said, they’re still way behind in a few areas.  I attended their “birds of a feather” session at Where 2.0 this week and came out with two very bizarre things.

First, they were showing off some new polygon-related features and how to code them.  It looked great, but I didn’t see how to assign altitude to a point so you can have it float in the air or be a side of a cube or whatever.  When I asked how it was done, they pretty much just grumbed and shook their heads.  I assume it’s coming soon, but right now polygons are flat on the ground.

Next was when they were showing off image overlays.  They showed an image overlay on the ground and then tilted down so we could see how it followed the flow the terrain.  There was an audible gasp in the room from being people so impressed.  My reaction was WTF?  Google Earth has been doing this for almost two years now.  It’s nice that VE does it now too, but why was it such a big deal?  I still haven’t figured that one out.

One other nice thing they showed off was how you can “rubberize” image overlays – stretch and skew them to fix whatever area you want.  This is sorely lacking from Google Earth and it was well-implemented.  On the flip side, it’s a pain in the butt to add any image overlay, whereas Google Earth makes it simple.

All in all, Virtual Earth is something to keep an eye on.  I’m very pleased they’re working so hard on this, as it’ll only serve to push Google even harder.   Also, the 3DConnexion SpaceNavigator is a must-have for VE, as Frank Taylor explains here.  It’s a must-have for Google Earth as well, but GE tends to have a bit better mouse control.  The mouse control in VE is quite awful, but the SpaceNavigator makes it much

better.