Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Google Map Maker Released

Google just went live with Map Maker, a program that makes certain regions around the world – like Jamaica, Iceland, Bahamas, Grenada and more – editable by everyone (everyone with a Google account, that is). “Map Maker allows you and your peers to add, edit and moderate most features you see on maps including roads, lakes, parks, points of interest, businesses, cities and localities,” Google writes in their blog post.

I find the interface for this tool somewhat non-intuitive in parts (for instance, a button in the explanatory legend looks just as clickable as an actually clickable button). But perhaps Map Maker is not intended for casual use in any case, and there’s a help wiki near-by too. For the future, I wonder about all the ways Google intends to share the mapping data people generate for them voluntarily. Wikipedia for instance gives away its content under a GNU license. Will Google’s Maps API and their embedding features be enough?

[Via Ionut at Friendfeed.]

Google Map Maker Released by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (16)

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