Great news for the French: Google Streetview is spreading out to more French cities! RenaLID had pre-announced it earlier today, and it is now official. The new areas encompassed by Streetview include Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Lille et Nice.

As soon as I saw the news, I typed the address of the place I was living in as a student in Toulouse. Well guess what: the Goocar is Google Streetview’s ultimate limit. Here is the street of my old apartment:


View Larger Map

Yep, that’s the dark street facing us (Rue du May). I’ve seen trucks pulling in and out of this small driveway, but I guess the GooCar didn’t feel like it. This is Google’s ultimate limit to recreate the earth in photo: Some places are just not accessible!

The same phenomenon happens for the Vieux Nice district: No Streetview coverage.

That’s too bad because the Vieux Nice really is the only cosy neighborhood of Nice. But the streets certainly are way too tiny. And even if the GooCar could access it, the pictures would be pretty dark, unless it flashes a spotlight on the walls that are being photographed (that would turn the Goocar into a disco-mobile!).

Google Streetview in France is great news, but as usual, the French show off their natural way for blocking the intrusion of US corporations. That’s the spirit!

Today, the team of Click2Map is proud to officially launch a feature that tackles one of the major weaknesses of online maps: Crowded maps.

The experience of maps is often diminished when markers are concentrated in a specific location, therefore lapping over one another. Here at Click2Map, as some of you already know, we are dedicated to take Google Maps to a higher level of control for your various professional needs.

Hence the auto-cluster feature! The auto-cluster feature is an easy-to-use tool of our map editor that will enable you to create a unique marker for each area where markers are too densely concentrated. Visitors can simply click on this unique marker to unveil the list of markers it withholds.

The clustering tool enables you to laser-tune the display of your clustered markers based on 3 parameters:
- Clustering rate: the higher the rate, the more markers will be cluttered
- Minimum markers: indicates the number of markers necessary to start building a cluster
- Maximum zoom: indicates from which level of zoom markers won’t be clustered anymore

The video below shows the new auto-clustering tool in action for the Hollywood celebrities’ map we created for the occasion.

To conclude, here is why the auto-clustering tool is a big deal for us:
1. It tackles the problem of markers overlap.
2. It becomes a new productivity tool for power-mapbuilders looking for the perfect map design.
3. It is so easy to apply that even first-time mapbuilders can figure it out on the fly.

We would also like to thank our friends who helped us spread the word about the auto-clustering feature:
- Google Maps Mania
- Slashgeo

And the news was also picked up by Kort for hovedet - The GIScovery Channel. This means a lot to us, thank you guys.

We wrote a few weeks ago about the opportunities/threats of building a business on top of Google Maps. The “mainstreamization” of maps shouldn’t even be argued anymore, but the technology isn’t at the top of its performance, and here are a few reasons why:

1. Submitting local listings: Anarchic vs Tyrannic.
In an interview of Frazier Miller and Shailesh Bhat from Yahoo! Local conducted by Eric Enge of Stone Temple (and found through Mike Bluemthals’ blog), the two managers explain their company’s approach for maps and local ads.

For professional map creators, the process of submitting geo-defined listings to mapping providers is long and uncertain. While Google is still a little loose on the control it handles over user-submitted data, we can see in the interview that Yahoo has set strict control rules to extract and exploit only quality data.

In the case of Google Local, you can’t be sure that some witty SEO brains won’t push their business in pole position on a category that they could not even be related to. In the case of Yahoo!, this is the opposite approach: Most of the information is manually scrutinized (urls, geocode, user-generated changes). “They do geo-code verification so a listing will be rejected if the address doesn’t code to an actual location”: That’s a tough one, because we’ve all experienced several time submitting an address, and getting an error message, whereas you are pretty sure that the address is correct. Your whole listing is at stake with Yahoo!

In both cases, submitting listings to maps providers is not a crystal-clear operation, and at the end of the day, you may be very disappointed with the way your markers rank and perform on a map.

2. Mapping is an art, not an exact science
Back in April, Chris Silver Smith wrote an excellent article on Search Engine Lands, Top Causes of Errors In Online Maps. He explains that mapping errors - like getting a location point on the wrong side of the road - are pretty common for multiple reasons:

“The vector shape files break curved lines down into straight line segments, and there are cases where the straight line approximation of curved features can make locations get pinpointed erroneously.”

“online mapping systems often interpolate (distribute evenly) addresses along each side of a street when, in fact, business addresses may all be clumped up at one end of the street.”

“When online mapping systems do not know the correct location for an address, they often will still generate a map for the user, making a map pinpoint default to the center of a ZIP code area, or default to the centroid of a city.”

There are seven more error reasons on Chris Silver Smith’s post, so I recommend reading it. This shows that computers can’t always provide an exact and reliable result for maps, which is embarrassing when the purpose of mapping technologies is to point to an exact place in space.

3. Crowded maps
That’s the downside for map consumers: Crowded maps. Sometimes, there are so many markers on a map that the laser-focused precision of maps gets distilled in a sea of markers. This automatically drives visitors away from a page. Crowded maps are a no-no. This recent discussion on Google Groups confirms this statement. A massive number of markers can also slow your browser down.

A solution for this problem has yet to be figured out. There are numerous map-based local merchants search engines that constitute great sources of information, but the vision of hundreds of markers all overlapping each other on a map just drives visitors away. Tackling this problem could mean enhancing the performance, ie the business, of such service providers.

xavierv

On Twittervision, maps turn into social venues. Twittervision serves up real-time tweets from all over the world on a map. You can search twitterers by area code, look at tweets on a 3D earth map, check out the latest uploads from Flickr and from Youtube.



Twittervision is more than a fun gadget. I find the experience of attributing a place to a tweet extremely enriching. People waking up in Paris, looking for booze in Detroit, watching the sunset in Sydney… As of today, I know a lot of people who are still confused with Twitter. That is because Twitter is more of a back-end engine serving SMS than it is a social portal. There is no real structure or context around it: we can still see the central pillar of this soon-to-become SMS juggernaut.

Through maps, Twittervision adds a new dimension to the short-messaging experience. The same way a wine is best defined by its place of origin, 140 characters can say so much more when geographically contextualized.

The creepy thought that first came to mind was, it is officially possible to fly over the world and read people’s thoughts in real time. Tell that to your grandparents and they will think you’ve just lost your mind. On the other hand, maps compensate the space distortion effect of the Web. It provides a visual system to define my position relatively to those of others. Psychologically speaking, having reliable spatial marks is crucial for a person’s proprioception.

I don’t mean to get all analytical on Twittervision, I just wanted to share that georss is a really awesome component of our new social habits.

Twitter is now on a map, and Click2Map is on Twitter: Anybody interested in online maps, let’s mingle!

http://twitter.com/click2map