23 Things #19 Google Maps

Okay, Google Maps is it cool or what? Yeah, I got to hand it to them they’ve developed a pretty cool app, even though I prefer to get my driving directions from Mapquest. There is so much more to Google Maps than you realize at first.

I understand that they have gotten a few people unhappy with their feature that allows you to roam around some cities at street level, but personally I really enjoyed the experience and, hey, it is a public place that this is occurring in, you know? I took my online street level tour by using Google Maps to move around the streets of San Francisco. It was pretty easy to navigate down streets, make turns onto another street and even move into traffic to get a really interesting experience. Unfortunately, this isn’t available for all cities, so you have to kind of take a guess, whether the city you are interested has that feature. I took a gamble and, lucky for me San Francisco was a good guess. Tip think big…

Google Maps has a lot built in. The whole satellite image of the area you are looking at is pretty cool, although that feature is available with other map services out there.  One thing I really like is the way you can create a hybrid that places the names of the streets onto the satellite photo. One creepy thing was the fact that images of locations appear without any people in them. They remind me of a photo I saw in the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.

Another great thing, which was in the news a while back, is how the API is available to create your own Mashups. Further, if you login you can see and use a lot of cool mashups that others have developed using the Google Maps API. My favorite was a nifty one that if you click a spot on the map would show you where you would wind up if you dug your way through the Earth. It is pretty cool and gives new life to the phrase, “Digging your way to China.”

Of course, other great features are how you can insert or create a link of a map you create and place it on your webpage or blog. I did this to place a map and picture of the library I work at in the sidebar. I had to do a lot of work to adjust the size, so it would appear decently in my sidebar, but after a week I decided it was time for the map to go. I could see a lot of great uses to this, such as explaining where an event is taking place and simply embedding a map in the web page showing the location of the place. Using a similar idea Google Maps lets you e-mail the map you have created to a particular e-mail account, I suppose in case you want to view it later  or send it to friends.

Google Maps is pretty easy to use and although you can type in an address to move in to a location, I found it pretty easy to simply zoom in and navigate using the map with nothing more than the mouse and the zoom in and out functions built into the map.

In any case, I think they have a great product and not only did I have a lot of fun playing around with it, but founnd that it can be a very useful tool to use for a variety of purposes. All right, I guess a babbled enough about Google Maps, too bad they don’t pay me after gushing over how cool they are. You know like a marketing fee or something. Nah, nevermind…