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?
while Map Maker doesn’t work in places like the U.S. and other well mapped-out areas of the world, you can edit things on U.S. maps such as place locations. It seems clear that Google Maps is a wiki of sorts now, meaning the community is responsible for a lot of the data on it.
It is interesting to picture the world as being mapped all over again. It seems like the work had already been done those past 500 years, by both scientific explorers and satellites. We are standing right now in the same world discovery stage, but in the digital revolution era. And instead of sending explorers all over the world to update info, the world knowledge digitizer (aka Google) relies on the locals to report that info to the mother ship chip.
Google has rarely been more challenged in its mission than in providing maps and local information to users in countries where there has never been any detailed digital map. (from Google Latlong blog)
I bet! the main challenge remains to decide if you can trust the people who will build that knowledge for you. In the old days, you could send a bunch of smart scientists around the world and you knew that you would get a fairly loyal representation of the world in return. Today, what would be the motivation for someone to spend endless hours building knowledge for the account of one multi-billionaire corporation?
Many NGOs also depend on a good base map to plan and execute their work. So much so that many NGOs have told us that they either cannot do their work without good maps or have to spend a lot of effort building these. (from the Google Africa Blog)
Well done Google! NGOs are trustworthy, and they need technology partners. And they’re free educated manpower.
Another issue that Google has yet to figure out is this: With all things equal, if two map-makers build a map of the same place, but with different data on it, who should Google trust? This model has its limit: Google came close to a big diplomatic incident just a few days ago because of their maps. I am really curious to see how this project will come along in Africa: The country is known for its geo-politic instability. Google will have to deal with those issues at one point in the development of Maps. How will they stand in this equation? They’re obviously going to have to take sides, and I’m curious to see how creatively they will approach this dilemma.
A few days ago, Google launched a really smart campaign to create incentives for business owners to register with the Local Business Center: They distributed real-size markers (even though markers only have a virtual size) to local businesses in various cities across the globe. Those lucky businesses - they are getting some local media attention - were selected by ‘local experts’. It is not clear how these ‘local experts‘ were selected though…
I happened to bump into one of those markers at the Butler and the Chef (picture above), and asked the chef how it happened.
It seems that the business owners who received the giant marker knew way ahead of time about this PR coup. Google dropped all of their markers during the night of Monday to Tuesday, around midnight. The Chef even painted the sidewalk blue in front of his restaurant to make the trophy stand out more. A reception was also organized at the City Hall, where the local business owners mingled with Mayor Newsom and a bunch of Google top executives.
This looks like a very smart way for Google to promote Maps. It’s also a good way to ensure that businesses list themselves on Maps, for the possibility that they’ll receive one of these markers, which are basically a (presumably) free endorsement of the establishment.
A few days ago, Zack Stern from PC World shared a few tips to enhance your googling. Amongst those tips is the ‘let Google Maps Find You’ tweak. Basically, instead of zooming in your location, or typing in your default location, with this tweak, you just click a link and the location-tracking technology takes 5 seconds to spot you nice and clear.
Things are going fast, very fast in the geolocation world. Yesterday, Google added two features which are rather small, but the ramifications of this move are potentially much large.
The first change is for users of the Google toolbar. From now on, when they will open a map, it will auto-center on their location. As MG Siegler points out on Techcrunch:
1. Its recently launched Latitude location-based network is only useful if it can automatically update your location, or make it really easy to do.
And 2. there are other big things Google could do with location information — such as serve you location-based ads.
Location-aware enabled devices are starting to dominate the market, and Google is positioned front-row to capitalize on this opportunity.
Another small addition in the seed-stage world of Google’s social maps is the save and share driving directions feature. MyMaps map creators (any user with a Google account) can now easily draw a line along a road, add a note, and share a map.
We have here two very small additions, but which open up wide possibilities when it comes to make mapping easier to use. Smart enough to know my location, and providing tools which make it easier to plan my next location.
So you thought that finding a purse through Latitude was the most offbeat news this week in the geo-consumer space? Well, I have a better story for you.
You have probably heard of those two Domino’s Pizza employees who created a video where our biggest phobia about fast-food employees are re-enacted. It’s been all over the news for the past two days. Well the way those two got caught is extremely far-fetched.
First, as it was saying on the Youtube page of the video before it was taken down:
This is a great lesson on why you never post something like this on the Internet. These Domino’s workers posted this on youtube earlier today (April 13, 2009) It was removed later this day but re-uploaded because these people deserve to be fired. If you want these people fired then Favorite, comment, and rate 5 stars so the word gets out and these people fired.
So the employees posted the video online for just a few hours, before taking it down, but alas the deed was done. It was re-posted right away by somebody else, and the virality of the social Web did the rest. But that’s not it. From the video, it is pretty hard to know in which of the 6,000 stores worldwide this hoax happened. That’s where it gets good! As the ABC reports:
Readers of the consumer affairs blog consumerist.com, which posted the video early in the week, tracked Hammonds down through her YouTube account and identified the store from matching an exterior shot in a video with an image on Google maps.
I told you that was far-fetched. They matched an exterior shot of one of the employees’ video with an image on Google Maps, which made it possible to track the location of the store where the joke-gone-wrong happened. I am personally baffled. I don’t know which image search engine they used for this, but hats off! That is some military-level image search that only a pizza corporation can afford to save the reputation of its brand
So what now? Are Google mapping technologies the next crime fighter? Your neighborhood’s eye and ear? It spots your stolen purse. It detects a fart on your pizza. What’s next?
Up until now, when you land on a Google map, you have no idea who actually created this map. The person who did it gets the benefit of showing you the things he wanted you to see on the map, but we thought that this was not enough. Mapping is like blogging: It should be clearly attributed to someone. Or at least we feel this is how it should be.
Today, Click2Map is releasing a new feature that enables our users to more deeply customize the look and feel of the maps you create. Every elements of the map is now customizable: header, footer, fonts, sidebar, colors, driving directions and address finder.. You name it, we customize it! (scroll down to the end of this post to find the complete list of customizable objects)
We are really excited about this new feature as our existing users know that before today, you could customize some aspects of your map, but the modifications were not happening live. You had to hit save and see if the modifications were ok. Now if you want to remove the address finder from the sidebar for example, it happens right away. Feel free to try different color combination, experiment sidebar looks, reflect on your visitors’ experience once they will land on your map… You can make decisions on the fly, making your map creation process richer and faster.
We also added a pretty neat feature for Silver accounts and up: the URL and email in the footer. Like we mention in the introduction, someone could land on your map, but nothing would actually indicate that you made it. No attribution on the Web is like anonymity, it doesn’t benefit your business. With Click2Map’s new feature, your Google maps are becoming a real traffic and lead generation tool! That’s quite some news, isn’t it?
For our existing users, simply log in your account, hit publish, and start playing around with the new map customization tool. For new users of Click2Map, go on Click2Map’s sign up page, compare our offers and pick the one that suits you best, and start customizing your maps too!
Not convinced yet about how good-looking your maps can be? Watch this video where Click2Map takes its top off and shows you the whole shabang:
Here is the complete list of today’s new addition:
Publish map as a Web page:
Preview in real-time
Show/hide map title
Show/hide map description
Show/hide the sidebar
Show/hide the sidebar after clicking an item in the list
Hide the sidebar upon startup
Modify the text in the footer
Link a Website to the map
Link an email address to the map
Turn on/off the address finder
Turn on/off the live traffic view feature (only available in some countries)
Customize each element’s style:
title: font, size, color
description: font, size, color
footer text: font, size color
sidebar text: font, size, color
markers’ title: color, underline
active tab’s background color
active tab’s title color
inactive tab’s background color
inactive tab’s background color
borders’ color
page’s background color
Publish maps as a widget:
Real-time preview of the widget
Show/hide sidebar
Show/hide sidebar after clicking on an item in the list
Show/hide sidebar upon startup
Turn on/off the address finder
Turn on/off the live traffic view feature (only available in some countries)
Customize each element’s style:
title: font, size, color
description: font, size, color
footer text: font, size color
sidebar text: font, size, color
markers’ title: color, underline
active tab’s background color
active tab’s title color
inactive tab’s background color
inactive tab’s background color
borders’ color
page’s background color
Other upgrades
Updated HTML editor for rich text areas (markers’ description for example)
Updated KML file uploader, now accepting drawings (polygons, lines) during import.
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.
This week, we made a few changes over at Click2Map regarding our paying accounts. To refresh everyone’s memory, Click2Map offers 4 different plans for its users: The Bronze plan (free), the Silver plan (making uploads and distribution easier), the Gold plan (Bronze+Silver+ supports CSV, XML, KML and geoRSS imports and exports) and the Platinum plan, where our database becomes yours.
For pure marketing purposes, we decided to restrict the number of maps and markers each account holders are allowed to create (see it like Facebook’s 5,000 friends limit policy). It goes a little something like this:
- Bronze accounts are limited to 1 map and 50 markers
- Silver: 5 maps and 250 markers
- Gold: 10 maps and unlimited markers
- Platinum: Unlimited maps and markers
Rest assured: If you are already signed up to Click2Map, those changes will not apply to you. We value the trust that all of our previous customers have showed towards our products, and we want to reward this trust. Also, for all of our customers, starting from the Silver accounts, you can now share password-protected maps if you want to keep your markers accessible to just a few eyeballs.
There is one new addition in our line of products that we are pretty proud about: because we have limited the number of maps and markers, we are launching the unlimited option for each of our products. Here is a clear example of how an unlimited option may apply:
If you need Click2Map to embed 10 maps with several hundreds customized markers, and driving directions on your site, you have to sign up to the Gold plan (10 maps and unlimited markers). However, in terms of tools, you do not need anything higher than the Silver version. Hence the unlimited Silver version, where you can do all you need and create as many maps and markers as you wish!
We didn’t do this just because we like to add fine prints into our plans: The unlimited Silver plan is $40 cheaper than the regular Gold plan ($149 vs $190). and the same goes for each of our products. In other words, where it may seem like we limited our offer, we actually made it more fair for every paying customer, and more flexible to fit all needs.
We hope that you will find this news as exciting as we do, and we welcome any feebacks from our users. To prove that we care, there is one last new addition that our customers have been requesting so heavily that we could not not let them have it: For our valued Platinum customers, the Click2Map logo will no longer appear on your maps once you publish them!
For a clear comparison of our different plans, click here.
Since the launch of Android-powered phones, Google has been active in releasing geolocation-related features. Last week, we covered the launch of Latitude, the service from the Mountain View-based search engine that lets you share your “exact” location with your friends on the spot. This week (Thursday to be precise), Google released My Tracks, a new application that enables users to easily share their outdoor activities with others.
My Tracks records tracks of outdoor activities using the phone’s built-in GPS. It shows these tracks on a map and presents live statistics, including an elevation profile. And here’s the best part: it lets you easily share your activities with friends and the world using Google Maps, as well as archive your training history with Google Docs.
Where Latitude received mixed reactions from the blogosphere for being a creepy app, My Tracks comes to the rescue to show how useful and fun geo-tracking can actually be. My Tracks is not pioneering this GPS application: hem, Map My Tracks is another independent application that does about the same, except that their app can be installed on over 100 different Web-enabled phones.
Stephen Shankland from Cnet tested the new app. He identified two main glitches with My Tracks: First, enabling GPS tracking on the G1 is extremely battery-consuming, where a Garmin device will last two days on two AA batteries. Second, it seems like Google isn’t accurate enough with its GPS tracking technology yet: altitude is never accurate, and you’re lucky if the marker of yourself on the map doesn’t put you 20 feet (or more) from where you actually are. On the good side of things, Stephen Shankland appreciated the sharing features associated with the app:
The ability to Twitter and e-mail links to maps is nice, and I e-mailed myself the KML file of my trip with no trouble, letting me view it in Google Earth at my leisure.
There are ups and down to Google’s new app. Nonetheless, what we are seeing here is the integration of geolocation technologies settling in our daily lives at the speed of light. Most people still don’t see how this technology applies to their daily needs, but faster then they will know, the technology will be embedded in their phones, and will become a main component of their daily activities! And once again, the businesses that did not ignore their geo-marketing potential will live happily ever after!
