Google mappers can now tag and share their favorite locations with other users, who can then spot those choice Yosemite camp sites or find the most intriguing Polish medieval buildings.
On Tuesday, Google launched Google Earth, a free software package that gives detailed, 3-D views of cities across the globe replete with thousands of restaurants, schools, hotels and other establishments. It also provides amusing motion graphics of the route between locations or 3D cities.
But as useful as that kind of information can be, Google Earth's true special sauce is the way it allows users to create markers for just about any venue or location, write a note describing it and then share it with the application's entire user base.
"The goal with Google Earth is to create a kind of browser for the planet," said John Hanke, general manager of the Google Keyhole group, which developed the application. "(Our mission) was to take it in the most extreme direction in terms of making this a virtual model of the planet."
Clearly, Google believes that the best way to achieve that goal is to let users populate its databases with countless markers for places and things its own programmers would never think of.
For months, users have been gaga over Google Maps, which quickly and easily conjures up maps of nearly anywhere in the United States. Particularly popular is the service's satellite views, which show detailed images of neighborhoods or particular streets. And because of its open architecture, others can create imaginative hacks that combine Google Maps with third-party services like craigslist.
Google Earth is Google Maps on steroids -- and the company has incorporated the hacking element into the product by allowing anyone to add their own details.
The system already includes dozens of hacks and thousands of tags acquired by Google when the company bought Keyhole, a satellite imagery provider, last year. Keyhole has encouraged its community of users to post their own data about places and things throughout the world.
One is a hack that mixes mapping information with data from the bus system in Boulder, Colorado, showing in real-time the location of the city's buses on the 3-D map.
There are plenty of others: a lighthouse tour of the United States, good hikes in Marin County, California, the best camping spots in Yosemite National Park and lists of medieval buildings in Gdansk, Poland.
"I'm reminded of all the railroad nuts and how they could create an annotated map of the (United States), showing all the best bridges, tunnels and places to watch trains go by," said Matt Haughey, creator of the popular MetaFilter group blog and an evangelist of user-created content.
To Haughey, the open service means users can develop and share far more information than any one company could produce alone.
Indeed, according to Hanke, Keyhole users -- and now those of Google Earth – have been doing just that, and the service's bulletin board system is full of countless such examples, many of which can be found under discrete, searchable categories -- like Beijing, U.S. warships, theme parks and many more -- on the Keyhole BBS.
But Haughey cautioned that Google Earth could be open to exploitation.
"Looking at Portland (Oregon), I see someone made an entry for some storage place," he said. "Probably someone that works there or owns it. Kind of like map spam."
Still, Hanke feels the upside of an open-ended database outweighs the problems. He noted that the service could be expanded by users in almost infinite ways -- an open-endedness that mirrors the infinite extensibility of the web.
"You see the promise of a view that lets you understand the web and graphical information on the web," Hanke said, "with the map as kind of the underpinning of that."
