30 May 2007

Street level maps from Google

Google have expanded their Google Maps service to include new street level views of major US cities.

Known as Street View, this new Google Maps feature enables users to view and navigate within 360 degree street level images of select US cities, including the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. Maps of other cities will make their way online in the near future.

Where enabled, clicking on the 'Street View' button in Google Maps presents the user with a blue outline of the streets covered under the new street view feature. By moving a 'person icon' around the city, the user is presented with a 360 degree panoramic photo bubble of the mapped area. Navigation buttons within the street view essentially allow visitors to 'walk' round a city and see local landmarks, restaurants, shops and even street signs.

Google are not the first to include this feature into a mapping tool: A9.com from Amazon have had similar street-viewing features - known as BlockView - for some time, covering more than twice the number of Street View enabled cities. MSN also have a similar service on their virtual earth mapping tool.

Google Maps have also announced a new tool for developers called Mapplets, designed to enable third party developers to create mini applications for display inside Google Maps. Google suggest these Mapplets can host a variety of information: from housing listings to crime data or distance measurement.

For developers, these widgets are nothing more than a mix of HTML, JavaScript and Flash, ensuring that the majority of web designers and developers can use these tools to create their own solutions easily and quickly. Once created by developers, Mapplets can be selected by users much in the same way as iGoogle, to form a library of useful applications that help get the most out of Google Maps.

At the moment, the preview version of Mapplets features three unique tools, including a distance measurement tool, movie show times and real estate search.

These two announcements from Google follow a raft of similar improvements from the likes of Yahoo! and MSN - all driving forward the idea of Web 2.0 hybrid applications, which take the relatively simple notion of an online map and add features that traditionally would have been offered by entirely independent services.