Google Maps

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Google introduced photo tours today—a new feature of Google Maps that allows users to watch 3D photomontages of worldwide landmarks by virtue of user-contributed content.

The tours are now available for more than 15,000 locations, and they include popular tourist spots like Italy’s St. Mark’s Basilica or Yosemite’s Half Dome. The new feature is accessible when a user searches for a place, and then the left-hand panel will display any live photo tours. Just click the thumbnail or link to embark on the photo tour. Indications for photo tours also appear when browsing Google Maps. In this instance, just click a landmark’s label to find an available photo tour.

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Earlier today, Walmart published a press release on its corporate website announcing that Google’s Vice President of Local, Maps and Location services Marissa A. Mayer has been nominated for the company’s Board of Directors. In addition to an announcement claiming she’s “very excited” about the nomination on her Google+ page, Mayer made a full statement in the press release:

“I am very excited to be nominated for the Walmart board… I have long been a customer and admirer of the company. Walmart is an amazing story of entrepreneurship and, as one of the world’s most powerful brands, touches millions of lives every day. I look forward to contributing to Walmart’s continued growth, success, and innovation in the years to come.”

Walmart will vote to elect Mayer at its Annual Shareholders’ meeting June 1. The company’s full press release is below:

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OpenStreetMap on "Wikipedia for Android" app

Wikipedia updated its Android and iOS apps today, but the noteworthy feature is that the online encyclopedia-like website dumped Google Maps for OpenStreetMap, which marks a growing trend for technology firms preferring an alternative mapping solution.

The company just announced its Android counterpart witnessed 2.25 million installs in less than two months since its birth, while netting over 23 million Wikipedia page views per month. Despite the success with Google’s mobile OS, Wikipedia updated its apps with Open StreetMap data in favor of the service’s “nearby view” feature.

Wikipedia further explained the reasoning behind the switch:

Previous versions of our application used Google Maps for the nearby view. This has now been replaced with OpenStreetMaps – an open and free source of Map Data that has been referred to as ‘Wikipedia for Maps.’ This closely aligns with our goal of making knowledge available in a free and open manner to everyone. This also means we no longer have to use proprietary Google APIs in our code, which helps it run on the millions of cheap Android handsets that are purely open source and do not have the proprietary Google applications. OpenStreetMaps is used in both iOS and Android, thanks to the amazing Leaflet.js library. We are currently using Mapquest’s map tiles for our application, but plan on switching to our own tile servers in the near future.

In the last couple of months alone, both Apple and Foursquare also shifted to OpenStreetMap. It is worth mentioning that Yahoo implemented OpenStreetMap data within Flickr in 2009 for a plethora of worldwide cities, such as Baghdad, Beijing, Kabul, Santiago, Sydney, and Tokyo.

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Google announced today that its live traffic pattern service will now include roads, not just highways.

“Starting today, if you’re planning a trip for which you anticipate traffic, you can find out what typical traffic is like on these arterial roads, rather than just on highways,” explained Google Maps Software Engineer Szabolcs Payrits on the official Google Lat-Long blog. 

Drivers can type their starting and ending points into Google Maps to get directions, but they must enable the traffic layer in the upper right-hand corner, and then click “change” in in the legend to view Typical Traffic on regular roads.

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Google launched its Street View galleries this past week for Amazon and Thailand without a hiccup, but the Internet giant was not-so lucky elsewhere, as it has faced many obstacles over its mapping applications throughout the globe—especially in Asia.

Reuters published a lengthy reported today detailing how Google often meets hurdles worldwide, such as the recent debacle on its privacy policy, and it fully described the Mountain View, Calif.-based Company’s tenacious attempts to chart the streets and landscapes of Asia while consistently meeting privacy, political, and cultural barriers.

For those that live under a rock: Google Street View is a service highlighted in Google Maps and Google Earth that offers panoramic views of streets. It launched in 2007 in the United States and has expanded to many cities and rural areas worldwide.

A round up of Asia’s criticisms is below.

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Detailed street-level imagery of landmark spots in Russian cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg is now available in Google Maps, Google’s Russia Product Manager Boris Khvostichenko announced in a blog post yesterday. Among other places, mapping aficionados can now tour Red Square, Moscow Kremlin, great palaces and parks, such as Tsaritsino, Peterhof, Kuskovo, the Oranienbaum, Alexandria, plus The Peter and Paul Fortress and the entire historical center of St. Petersburg (a UNESCO Heritage Site). St. Petersburg is Russia’s former capitol—now the country’s second largest city and northernmost megapolis. As for Google Earth enhancements…

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Google released updates today to three of its popular Android apps: Google Maps, Goggles, and Listen.

Google Maps was updated with a small new feature called “night mode” that will help you better navigate through tunnels. There is not much word on how exactly this feature will work, but it sounds cool nonetheless.

Google Goggles was updated to version 1.7.1 with a long list of updates. Goggles will no longer store inaccurate locations for queries in search history and it will not crash when loading large bitmaps. The app also features the usual performance enhancements and will now show the description field for user-submitted results.

Lastly, Listen’s update is small. It fixes an issue where Listen would improperly take audio focus from other apps while in the background. You can download these updates from the Android Market. (via Android Central)

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A tipster over at the Google Operating System blog pointed out a small —but welcomed— tweak in Google Maps that lets you highlight areas of interest based on upon search queries:

When you search for a city or a county or a ZIP Code, Google Maps now highlights the boundaries of what you searched for. If you are zoomed out, the whole area is shaded pink. If you zoom in a bit, it has just a big pink border with grey shading. Zoom in even more and it’s a dashed boundary with grey shading.

In the above screenshot, I searched for Cupertino, Calif., and Google Maps automatically highlighted the city’s area inside the map view, allowing me to visually grasp the size of Cupertino. Note that the highlighting feature does not work in other Maps views, such as satellite.

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Google just revamped the look of Latitude, its location-aware service akin to Foursquare. According to a post by Google’s community manager for Google Maps, Danial Mabasa, the new Google Latitude interface can be now accessed on desktop browsers at www.google.com/latitude. As you can see from the above screenshot, it is not much different from Google+. However, upon remembering how the old website looked, it is definitely a major makeover that helps achieve consistent user experience across Google’s key properties.

You can now easily access your friends’ list in the left-hand column or click the wrench icon to customize your personal location history and location settings. Whenever you want to manually update your location, just hit the Update button next to your name and approve your browser’s location sharing prompt. Another cool feature lets you playback your location history (should you choose to preserve it) from a select range of dates by pressing the Play button on the bottom left-hand corner of the map.

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Launching on the Google+ Games platform, Google is showing off a new game involving its Google Maps product. The game, as you can see demonstrated in the video above, involves rolling a blue ball around a map. The game is set to launch sometime in February.

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Google Maps is making headlines in a variety of ways this week.

A Jan. 10 update to the Android application made noise at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show yesterday. The Google Maps upgrade claimed to increase battery life while improving location tracking within Google Latitude.

The latest version Google Maps also improved Transit Navigation and more closely estimates location position when GPS signal is lost. The update even increased the number of possible transit routes from three to four.

The final update includes indoor maps that can —well— navigate around various indoor venues in the United States. In this particular update, maps for CES in the Las Vegas area were included (hence all the commotion).

“We hope that these indoor maps will come in handy when finding your way through the slots and to the shops,” announced Google on its LatLong blog. “And for those of you who catch gadget-fever with CES in town, we’ve also partnered with a number of Best Buy stores in the Las Vegas area.”

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More information on the updates are available below.

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Google has kept it promise and released an updated Street View imagery documenting the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that had partially destroyed or completelly wiped out large parts of Northeastern Japan. The search company described in a blog post how starting inland and venturing out toward the coast “you’ll see the idyllic countryside change dramatically, becoming cluttered with mountains of rubble and debris as you get closer to the ocean”.

They also added a timestamp to the bottom left corner of each image helping you to contextualize what you’re seeing. This new timestamp feature is now available on Street View imagery worldwide, Google noted. The street-level imagery of the affected areas are truly shocking to those of us lucky enough not to experience a natural disaster of such magnitude.

As people were sifting through wreckage caused by the devastating quake-tsunami combination, Google sent out Street View cars to capture the 360-degree panoramic imagery of the scene some nine months later. An even more horrifying depiction can be found at Google’s newly set up site called Build the Memory that has the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photos.

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UPDATE [Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:58am ET]: Ouch! Google has killed Google Shoot View.

A Dutch advertising agency called Pool Worldwide has turned Google Maps into a first-person shooter. The website is called Google Shoot View, and simply puts a first-person M16 overlay on top of Google Maps Street View — and quite frankly that’s really it. There’s no blood, running, or screaming, but just the fun of simply shooting at whatever appears on Google Maps. While it won’t replace your midnight Call of Duty rampage, it’s a fun little game to play while sitting at your desk. Check out the promotional video after the break. (via Business Insider)

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Silicon Filter grabbed some pertinent quotes from Marissa Mayer’s interview today at LeWeb on Mobile, Local, Social (SoLoMo).  We’ll have the video up when it becomes available.  Notables:

• Google+ was a pleasant surprise. Comparing to the low bar set by past efforts, we’ll give this one a “#obvious tag.
• “We save two years, every day, of idle time using Google Maps and Navigation.”
• Google+ Check-In Deals Coming Next Week (goodnight FourSquare?)
• On the location space in general, there is still  a lot of competition
• Android is a vehicle for delivering Google services

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Google has posted the following video on their blog today showing off the new Street View feature inside of Google Maps that allows users to view local parks. Google has traveled across the world to add parks from 22 countries. You can check out the full list of parks here.

Do you see your local park on there?

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Canadians are getting a little bit of love today from Google as Google Map Maker for Canada officially goes live. The project has been available in the U.S. since earlier this year and elsewhere since 2008, but now Canadians too can add local geographic data to Google Maps.

By heading over to www.google.ca/mapmaker, you can now start adding points of interest (adding/naming buildings, restaurants, schools, etc.), rivers, trails and roads, or update existing landmarks to make them more accurate. Of course all of your edits will first have to be approved for accuracy by Google engineers before being displayed on Google Maps.

The tool isn’t too difficult to use. You can easily select a route for a bike path or newly constructed road, drop a familiar red pin to add a point of interest, or draw a shape to add a building or landmark. You’ll already notice a lot of edits and additions to the Canada map, as Canadian Google employees have been testing out the tool in preparation of today’s launch.

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Noticed by the guys over at The Handheld Blog (via Android Community), Nokia has been rolling out some pretty significant updates to their HTML5 maps web app for Android (and iOS) accessible at m.maps.nokia.com. This brings the web app a lot closer to the quality maps experience exclusive to the N9 and other Nokia devices.

If you haven’t checked it out recently, you will now notice the ability to download maps over WiFi for offline use, allowing you to bypass the need for a data connection when on the go. The update also brings a few other goodies including public transit routes and directions (which adds to the driving and walking navigation introduced in past updates), local area guides, and new point of interest (POI) landmarks showing local retailers, gas stations, etc.

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A few members of the Google Maps team answered some pretty interesting questions on Reddit about the platform, from the community. Business Insider posted some of the highlights from the thread:

1. Building shadows within Maps are astronomically correct with the time of day and sun. Google did however scale the shadows.
2. Antartica has a street view in Google Maps.
3. Google collects 3D views with three laser cameras on their street cars.
4. The team is excited about/considering making a 3D game using Maps data.
5. Google Maps has a street view partner program for anyone to add street view photos taken with their own camera.
6. For colorblind Maps users, Google is figuring out how to accommodate users with the red and green indicators for Traffic.
7. Google favors higher quality images that are older over blurry ones that are newer.

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What do you get by marrying Google Maps to WebGL, a software library that extends the capability of the JavaScript programming language to allow it to generate interactive 3D graphics within any compatible web browser such as Google’s Chrome 14 or Firefox Beta? Pure awesomeness, that’s what. They are calling to Google MapsGL and it enables “far richer visuals and animations”, the search company wrote in a blog post this morning:

WebGL is a new technology that brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser without additional installed software. With WebGL your maps experience is much better with 3D buildings, smoother transitions between imagery and the ability to instantly “swoop” into Street View without a plugin.

Just visit maps.google.com and click “Try it now” to take hardware-accelerated Maps for a spin. We wrote in the past about WebGL-based Chrome experiments worth checking out, including a remarkable water simulation and interactive music video.

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As noted by The Next Web, Google’s VP of Product Bradley Horowitz, told Wired in an interview that Google+ will soon be Google. “Be Google?”, you’re probably thinking. What he means is that Google+ will soon not be its own product, but rather tied into almost every service offered by Google. You may remember when Google+ was sort-of tied into YouTube, but Horowitz says it will go deeper than that.

“Until now, every single Google property acted like a separate company. Due to the way we grew, through various acquisitions and the fierce independence of each division within Google, each product sort of veered off in its own direction.

… But Google+ is Google itself. We’re extending it across all that we do—search, ads, Chrome, Android, Maps, YouTube—so that each of those services contributes to our understanding of who you are.”

Google+ will soon be tied into ads (which has already happened), Chrome, Android, Maps, and more. This will begin to make a definitive Google product, leaving Google+ no longer acting as a separate company. This should make it easier on the non-technical folk, unlike you or me.