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Fun with maps
Google have had “new” against their Maps link on the uk home page for some time now. So what’s new - well there are a few things but you may have to look for them.
Firstly when you plan a route you can now drag the suggested route around a little - this makes planning routes that are a little more realistic as Google Maps doesn’t seem to be aware of major road works when planning my route, but I will get to that later.
Secondly “My Maps” is the most obvious change. In My Maps you can add your own icons, text bubbles and even lines and polygons. This is quite cool - I suppose it is a glorified bookmark, but on a maps.
Where it gets interesting is with the directory of maps and overlays you can add to your maps. Popular ones include distance calculators, elevation contours and realtime earth quakes just to mention a few. It was at this point I noticed a link - developer tools and led me to look at how to create these maps. Within a very short space of time I had created my own mapplet of a few National trust locations near to where I live. Now I have this as an overlay on my Google maps so that when I plan trips I can see when I will be driving past a National Trust garden. - Have a look at the National Trust Mapplet if you like…. Of course places like the National Trust could offer this as a service. It could be another way to direct people to the amazing places while they are planning a trip to a nearby town. Picture, overlays, video and narrative could be added to these mapplet to make them very interesting indeed! - maybe something like Google Street View - well we will see what happens with this and how many business’ and organisations look down this route.
Another direction Google Maps have gone is in the integration with in-car GPS systems - well one at the moment “Mercedes-Benz” (Yahoo have also gone down this direction). A service called “Search & Send” allows you to plan your route on your computer then send the route to your navigation system…. however - as usual this is only available in the US and only if you have a Mercedes-Benz - so most of us will have to wait a bit before we all see the wonders of this technology.
So where can this go? Well one possibility is maybe all the above could be combined. And in-car navigation systems maybe powered by web based systems like Google maps or more importantly data from the web can be fed live into the your system, and I don’t mean the data selected by GPS manufacturers - but data provided by users like the National Trust mapplet I created, or any of they other mapplets in the Google Maps directory. Maybe a decent mapplet with live traffic updates (a US live traffic example can be found here) and possibly some kind of integration with social networking - as usual the possibilities are limitless - but we will have to wait and see how this develops.
Sounds very interesting! I wonder how easy it would be for Sustrans (www.sustrans.org.uk) to import all their detailed mapping information, cycle routes, national trust and national heritage sites into a Google maplet. Wouldn’t that be awesome if you could see all the cycle routes whilst on google maps. Then all you need is a mercedes-benz bicycle and you might be to download the route to your handlebar mounted SatNav and really have the world at the end of your pedals:-))