It makes little doubt today that Google is the most universalist company of the twenty-first century:

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.(From Google Corporate Site)

Google-owned Blogger just celebrated its 10 years anniversary, and focused their communications on the 300 millions blogs created. As of today, Google can translate 50+ different languages into your own. On Youtube, if you submit captions with your video, then foreign viewers can watch your video in 50+ languages instantly. Google is literally cracking open the Tower of Babel dilemma, by offering a technology that offers one universal language. Is Google better than Jesus?

Maybe not so. Google has one huge problem: its Maps! Maps is Google’s most beautiful product, but it is also the most problematic, because it pushes the search company to get into the muddy waters of geopolitics.

Recently, Switzerland asked Google to take away Streetview from Switzerland’s Google Maps. The neutral central-European country explains that despite Google’s responsiveness for Streetview’s users’ complaints, the privacy of its citizens is too much at stakes.

You can get more details about this news in this Information Week article. To emphasize on Google’s problems with Streetview in general, writer Thomas Claburn provides other examples where Google Maps’ technology failed when applied in different cultures. For example:

Street View has also met resistance in Japan. Google was asked to re-shoot Street View images in twelve Japanese cities using cameras positioned lower to the ground, to avoid photographing over the fences protecting people’s yards.

Wow, couldn’t they figure that out before shooting every street corners of Japan?

Click2map’s value proposition is pretty straight-forward: Edit and Publish more robust Google maps. While we are successful at providing such a service, we feel that our users sometimes get confused about our different paying plans, and what each of them provides. This page has a good comparative table of our different plans, but we felt like a little video would probably be the best way to communicate our different products in an entertaining way. Enjoy!

To recapitulate, here are our plans:

Silver:
- Publish maps as widgets
- Password protection
- No ads OR revenue sharing
- Detailed traffic report
- Bulk operations

Gold:
- Import/export tool

Platinum:
- Our logo off your maps
- Markers’ templates
- Insert variables

By the way, we just created our own Youtube channel, where we will be posting screencasts and video related to our company. If you have a Youtube account, pay us a visit, and subscribe, add us as friends, comment, rate, share… We’ll be glad to reciprocate any friendly gesture

No, GeoAggregateMe doesn’t actually exist, and if it did, it would have a different, sexier name. But for ambitious developpers out there, aggregating people’s whereabouts and thoughts might just be the next big thing.

The real deception with the 2.0-transformed Web is the timid space it created for advertisers in our interpersonal conversations. No cash, no growth, no accomplishment. However, smartphones are bringing the beat back by tracking down users’ locations, which opens up the doors of live geo-targeting for local businesses. Whatever I do, my location is enough info for some advertiser to show me its ad.

Who are those Web services that know who you are and where you are going? There are a few:

- First there is Google. As I wrote last week, Google’s got a Local Business Center, Android, Gears, Latitude, Google Maps, and so on. They are tracking us down like it’s nobody’s business.
- Thanks to its mobile integration, Twitter gets a lot of location juice that will undoubtedly attract advertisers.
- Facebook knows a bunch about users’ location but they face a different privacy issue that Twitter does.
- The geosocial tool Loopt gets pings from users several times a day.
- There is also Yelp. On Yelp, you say where you’ve been, and give your appreciation of that place. Goldmine for geo-targeting purposes!

The same way we have bits of discussions all over the Web and have a hard time putting the pieces back together, our location is shattered over different services. It would be nice if 1. those services opened up their users’ location data, and 2. a Friendfeed for geodata opened its doors.

GeoAggregateMe would generate a shameless amount of geodata on its users: Such a service could be fun and profitable.

Yesterday, the Google geo development team released the Latitude GeoRSS feed into the wild through an API. I find it surprising that Google is opening up its users’ geo-data this fast. Here’s why:

In this very young geo-location space, Google is taking a major lead with Android. It turns them into one of the rare Web-based service that tracks directly users’ location. Android’s numbers aren’t tearing the roof off, but they are not bad either: In March, AdMob reported that Android phones experienced a 44% monthly growth are in the first months after launch, while the iPhone got a 88% monthly growth rate (however, I would like to compare the marketing spend of both companies for the launch, Apple obviously had more buzz).

The reason this is an advantage for Google is mobile advertising. The Web on mobile will probably become the most profitable advertising channel for brands and local advertisers alike. A plethora of ad networks are popping up in this space. However, while focusing on serving ads, those ad networks will have to buy the geo-data juice from data providers… Like Google: Latitude encourages mobile users’ to share their location voluntarily and regularly. Payday!

So why is Google releasing its geo-juice so fast?

We have tried to make this process as easy as possible, but we realize there is an entirely different set of people (you guys, the developers!) that want to do more interesting things with their location.

In other words, they are creating a developers’ ecosystem around their geo-data center, which creates many benefits:
- Start developing geo-advertising solutions on Google’s platform
- Develop good ideas for Adwords to integrate later
- Maybe develop an economy around Latitude (and Android?)
- Pioneer to become a leading geo data provider.

However, Google’s Achille’s heel in this story is its social networking potential: It’s close to being null. On Google, you search, you create documents, you watch videos, but Google doesn’t connect you with your close ones the way Facebook does. Their social graph algo is known to be a bit screwy. So they will need the help of somebody else to capture our location while we socialize on the go.

I have enabled the ’share your location publicly’. I don’t find it scary. I have the feeling that nobody really cares where I am anyway (except advertisers). And it’s not that accurate anyway. But I really like updating my gtalk with my location. Geekilicious!

Haha, this link is on top of Reddit’s homepage right now and I thought I would share it with you in case you missed it. What happens when a streeview car goes under a low bridge? Follow this link, and follow the direction the car is taking towards the tunnel:

http://maps.google.com/maps?cbp=12,175.75237417767164,,0,9.058441558441539&cbll=40.450223,-80.009032&layer=c&ie=UTF8&t=h&panoid=VsY0kJkFUu2y4jf9U0TL2w&ll=40.450131,-80.008997&spn=0,359.983478&z=17

A goocar looks like this:

For other goocar extravaganzas, check out this article: Top 10 Google Street View Cars (GooCars) Extravaganzas

It’s already a well-known fact around the SEO community, but it seems there is a lengthy lobbying to be done online to change mentalities about traditional SEO. Google SEO is not just about keyword strategies, links and hyper-active blogging. Today’s shortcut for professionals is Google Maps. Google invests a lot of time and energy in geo-technologies, as it believes it is the direction the mainstream Web is heading towards, and it pushes its geo-located search results on top of its SERPs (search engine result pages).

Today, an engineer of Google Maps reminds on the Google Latlong blog that user-generated content will get blended into maps and distributed across the Google Search pages.

Some of our more regular users may have noticed that we’d been sparingly doing this for a while now, occasionally surfacing results from KML, GeoRSS, or Wikipedia we crawl from the web, along with photos and videos we think would be useful - but now we’ve opened the floodgates! From now on, you can expect to see more higher quality user-created content to show up, often intermixed with our traditional results.

In other words, just create maps, Google will find them and index your content if it thinks your content adds value to the Google geo-search experience.

Off course, here at Click2Map, we are proud to be positioned as one of the leaders in the map creation space. Anyone can sign up to our service, easily generate a massive amount of geo-located content on Google Maps, and let the magic of Google bots do the rest.

Remember, Google makes it easy for anyone to find anything, but we make it easy for Google to find you.

About two weeks ago, Google launched the MyTracks application, which purpose is to track your whereabouts through your smartphone, and share this itinerary through a Google Maps or a KML file.

In a more recent discussion, Corvida from Shegeeks writes about the importance of location-awareness services. She states:

“With money becoming tight around households it’s no surprise that people may be spending less time traveling from city to city and more time exploring the options available in their own city thanks to the “recession”. [...] With people venturing out more in their own city, they’re more likely to use location-awareness services to find new events and venues to explore.”

In other words, when short on cash, we tend to look for the closest and most affordable solutions for our daily consuming needs. A geolocation search is the appropriate tool for this type of demand, and today’s well-geolocated businesses are grabbing an increasing number of market shares. If you are a professional and seek to grow your geolocated presence, consider these powerful tools to successfully reach your objective. They will help you build a strong presence on Google Maps.

Another one of Corvida’s bullet point about the importance of location-aware services is the resulting social networking potential. I am not entirely convinced by the ‘meet-new-people-in-your-area’ potential of location-awareness services, unless it is in a given context like a conference or a concert. However, I believe that mapping your whereabouts - with MyTracks for example - is a way to bring people closer in a more meaningful way.

Here is an example: My wife lives on the other side of the globe, and we also have an 18-month-young son. For practical reasons, my son is now staying with me in San Francisco where he was born. There is no need to say how tormenting it is for the mom to have her little boy live 5576.4 miles away from her. Thanks to new Web technologies, it is becoming easier to be constantly connected to one another, share our daily activities, and therefore feel closer to one another.

The location-awareness tool MyTracks dramatically helps us enhance this long-distance connection. Tonight, I took my boy on a walk around my neighborhood. I turned on the MyTracks app on my phone, and slowly headed to the Safeway to purchase diapers. When I got home, I stopped MyTracks and sent the itinerary to my wife by email, with a little message attached saying: ‘hey Mommy, I went for a walk with Daddy, here are all the places I saw today!’ With the Streetview feature, my wife can literally replicate our walk around the neighborhood. Now isn’t that the most value you can get out of location-awareness services?

Here is the itinerary:

View Larger Map

In a recent blog post, Glenn Letham from the AnyGeo blog questions the privacy issues of geotagging, ie attach a geographic location to an item posted online. The geo blogger takes the example of this photographer who took the picture of two women, posted it in Flickr (where he puts all of his work), filled in the associated geolocation info, hence making it possible to spot where the two ladies live.

With a click of the mouse I could see exactly where he captured the photograph of the two women - the location was a home in a residential neighborhood.Using other online search tools, local search, white pages, reverse geocoding etc… I’m sure I could have also easily determined the names, address and phone number of a girl in the photo… a bit disturbing, right??

So is it disturbing? The first thing to consider is the context in which geolocation is applied. For example, when the social network Friendfeed integrated a geolocation feature, blogger Duncan Reiley (and a plethora of other bloggers) questioned the necessity to localize blog posts: “Cool is for bragging rights and yes it is really cool that the FriendFeed team figured out how to do this but man what a totally pointless feature.” In some way, the Techcrunch ex-blogger also questions the need to automatically geotag user-generated content.

Geotagging is growing as a main component of our online activities since mobile phones have built-in GPS, which is accessible to any given application on the phone operating on the phone. Since this, all those applications have been playing around with this GPS-enabled feature: Geo-locate your tweets, your Brightkite videos, your friends (Loopt), or simply yourself. In those cases, except for a few rare exceptions, geolocation is totally useless.

The question now has turned into this: “Is the pointless use of geotagging disturbing?” Ten years ago, there was no way I would use my real name anywhere online, whether it be in a chat room, forum, or social game (those are the only pre-Web 2.0 social tools I can think of). We all felt that the online world was just not secure enough. Today, Facebook makes everyone use their real names online. And we don’t mind going for it because there is a secure dedicated platform out there that makes sense out of using our real names: it enables us to recognize each other online. We do not have the Facebook equivalent for geolocation. No search engine crawls a database of geolocated info to tell us who was where at what time. We don’t even know what it could used for. We are facing our own ignorance, it creeps us out, and we get into the usual shortcomings of the human mind: sexual predators, child kidnappers, psychopathic stalkers, terrorists…

But with a little psychology wisdom, I think we should get some perspective on our geolocated lives, and realize that it is just a mere reflection of our offline existence. Interpreting the unknown with irrational fears is so typical that I wonder why we still do it…

2008 is closing down on us. Unlike what the eighties movies predicted for the future, we are still running cars on gas (even though Prius sales boomed this year), world poverty keeps being the hidden guilt of the rich minority, and we haven’t found an instant cure for a simple cold.

A lot happened on the Web though. The mobile Web is becoming mainstream at a faster pace than we can imagine, thanks in part to the iPhone 3G. The interesting aspect of the iPhone (and other smartphones like the g1) is its geolocation feature. The phone can detect your location and guide you around.

GPS is not a 2008 technology, but associated services related to this feature are opening up new opportunities. Loopt was the most advertised iPhone app heading towards this direction this year. I was personally more impressed by the g1’s zombie run game, even though the features are still pretty basic so far.

Of course, here at Click2map, we are interested to see how Google Maps evolves in this space:

(in 2008) Google Maps continued to increase the coverage for Street View, which is now available in the US, France, Italy, Spain, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. You can now get walking directions, car directions enhanced by StreetView, traffic estimations and explore places by looking at geo-tagged photos and videos.(via)

A few days ago, Google Maps launched a translation feature for all Google Maps reviews. The launch of the Google Map Maker also opened the option for anyone to contribute to the effort by bringing their own pieces to the puzzle.

There is a lot going on around geodata. By locating entities, and criss-crossing different positions, the web is making it possible to better connect individuals with other individuals, and with businesses. The question remains: Even though the technology is being developed, are people adopting it? Do people use maps more often? What is the trend for 2009?

Here are a few insights from the Google Search Insights site:

Of course, here at Click2map, we believe that those numbers are not innocuous. For example, we have seen the high demand for driving directions and have responded to it. Those curves are also showing how the pioneer Mapquest has lost its leadership to Google Maps. Finally, it shows how the technical term geoweb is gaining awareness and is pushing curious minds to search for it.

In 2008, we have seen a lot of geolocation features spreading onto widely-used Web applications such as social networks. In 2009, based on this article from the Boston Globe, I think we should expect to have more info delivered to us based on our location.

For a great review of mapping in 2008, read this article: Loci 2008: Matt Cutt’s Important Local Articles of 2008.

Happy New Year!

Have you ever heard of NORAD? They are the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace and maritime defense of the United States and Canada. They are a big deal! This year, as a high priority level mission, the organization will track Santa Claus going around the globe distributing gifts. This is a rather unusual mission for a military organization, but it’s also a wholehearted one, so let’s not criticize for once.

The interesting thing this year is Santa will be trackable on Google Earth . On Dec. 24th, just go to this page and click on the red button that will appear in the middle of the page to download the special Santa Tracking file.

While you wait for the 24th, go hang out on the Kids’ countdown page, where a flash animated interface offers games that evolve around the spirit of Christmas. According to GiftGuide, The game consists of getting a clue and then finding a hidden toy on Google Earth. It’s like Christmas geo-caching without going out in the cold!

I played a few games, and I didn’t see anything leading to clues, but I trust kids to be more cunning than me.

This game makes me wonder: if we can duplicate the earth digitally, and track chimerical objects on this duplicate, we are somehow giving a life to Santa, a real one. That’s pretty spooky in a frankensteinish way if you ask me: That’s the magic of Christmas!

Happy holidays everyone!