Google plots road map into the Social Networking realm with My Maps
By George Gardner
You may have noticed a new feature on Google Maps today; Google’s new service, My Maps, allows you to create your own map by overlaying paths, audio, photos, and video across the standard Google map. Users can then share it with the world or just keep it for themselves.
Google maps is certain to attract much more attention as it becomes a place for locals to share their wealth of knowledge about their neighborhood and surrounding community. Perhaps Google relying on their users instead of their computers, to build maps, will prove to be a step in right direction as the Internet is quickly changing to social networking solutions.
“This is a big change,” said Jessica Lee, product manager of Google maps, “Even if we cut loose all our developers, we could never create maps with the same depth and quality as our users can.”
My Maps allows you to create your own maps by adding placemarks, lines, and shapes to particular areas of Google Maps. For instance, one could map out a road trip that was recently taken by adding lines across roads that they’ve traveled.
Additional features allow you to include video and images from your trip by creating placemarks where the media was taken. One could essentially create their own photo album of images they took around the world, and share them with the ‘My Maps’ community.
Users are given the option to make their personalized maps public or private. Selecting ‘public’ will put your map in the Google My Maps database, where other users can then search for your map using keywords on Google Maps and Google Earth. Custom maps will also be given a URL by clicking ‘link to this page,’ which allows you to send your maps to friends and family, or publish to your blog.
Several example maps are shown including an interesting one by Jay Crim and Shekar Davarya, a couple of Google’s own engineers, as they spent the summer of 2002 driving across Route 66 collecting audio interviews from people and gathering images.
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April 14th, 2007
To engineers Crim and Davarya:
Thanks for archiving a portion of our culture and history that would soon be lost.
I have an interesting map for you, but first let me fill you in on some pertitnent facts:
Do you know that at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they refined a voting system that elects by majority without a second delayed runoff? It is called instant runoff voting (IRV).
There are nine states that have two primaries (double primary system) to require a primary majority, but do not require a majority in their general elections!
There is one state that used to have a double primary, but now has an open, nonpartisan primary that sometimes results in a majority before the general election! And that is the only state that requires a majority in the general election.
Just as an indicator/barometer of the effects of no majority requirement, check out the website and see that eighty governors have been elected with less than half the vote between 1948-2003.