I must be on the same wavelength as Google engineers this week. Yesterday, they released a send-to-car feature that I’d blogged about the day before.
Today, after finishing my post on predictions for satellite navigation, I opened Google Reader to find that Google has added images of businesses to Google Maps. OK, it’s not the same as a PND that calls up images of your destination, but it’s headed in that direction.
The images are crawled; many of them are extracted from local sites like Yelp and local newspapers. Unfortunately, there isn’t an indication of which businesses have photos associated. (I’m betting that they figure eventually they’ll have enough coverage that an indicator isn’t necessary.)
The Google pictorial map of my neighborhood isn’t as good as the one that I made on Flickr, but the process is a lot more scalable.
Two other recent noteworthy additions:
- On the map view, Google is showing the outlines of the roofs of buildings, which look like reliefs made from the satellite view.
- You can now see subway stations on the map. For city dwellers, this is a key feature. I’ve wanted it for a while. It will save me the step of having to use other tools to find the nearest subway. Now they just need to add the line the stop is on and real-time train information.
Maybe they can work on this next: Personal mashups – letting users redraw the map.
Rakesh Agrawal's blog 
5 responses
[…] transit stations. They are the small blue circles you see on the map. Google’s icons are much clearer, but it’s a big step to have them available at all. Ideally, they would use the icons that […]
[…] online maps offered by Mapquest and Vicinity in the mid-’90s. Now we can see parking garages, photos, building outlines, subway stations, elevation profiles, bike routes, neighborhoods, user-generated content and […]
[…] online maps offered by Mapquest and Vicinity in the mid-’90s. Now we can see parking garages, photos, building outlines, subway stations, elevation profiles, bike routes, neighborhoods, user-generated content and […]
[…] online maps offered by Mapquest and Vicinity in the mid-’90s. Now we can see parking garages, photos, building outlines, subway stations, elevation profiles, bike routes, neighborhoods, user-generated content and […]
[…] online maps offered by Mapquest and Vicinity in the mid-’90s. Now we can see parking garages, photos, building outlines, subway stations, elevation profiles, bike routes, neighborhoods, user-generated content and […]