There are a lot of green social networks out there: Care2, Greenwala, Gaia, Greenvoice… They all offer excellent social networking tools to encourage greener lifestyles through mutual help. One of those Websites, MakeMeSustainable, created a little Google Maps mashup to enable users to mark green businesses on a map. As a user registered in San Francisco, when I open this page, it suggests green locations in my area. When maps appear in the context of a social network, they always feel more consumer-friendly (because specific to a center of interest).

Up the green mapping alley, there is a much more impressive player in the field: Open Green Map.

Open Green Map leverages the collaborative intelligence behind social technologies to provide a comprehensive geo-located resource to find green sites, wherever you are! So far, volunteering contributors have created more than 350 maps in over 50 countries. I find their tagline ‘Directions to a sustainable future’ wittingly appropriate.

As of today, the most interesting way to engage with Open Green Map is to explore their maps. There are two features that the Open Green Map team built on top of the Google Maps API that I really liked:

1. First, maps appearing in an expanded marker’s window all have the background template of OpenGreenMap.org. In terms of maps’ marketing and branding, this is very smart and well-executed.

2. In the right sidebar, you have a small window that contains info about the map, about the map creators, and a search box to look for a specific keyword in the sites marked on the map. I have looked for this feature on Google Maps, and am pretty sure it doesn’t exist. This is some untapped search activity that Google is missing, but that Open Green Map nailed perfectly.

Open Green Map is a long way from becoming a complete resource. Also, as it will grow in popularity, I’d like to see how they will control the ‘green’ label users are applying to the sites they contribute to the system. There is still a lot of clutter, mainly when it comes to creating a map (I just couldn’t access this feature). It seems like you can share documents (hosted on Slideshare) about a list of companies, but I am not sure what it is for. Building a green geo-platform is an excellent idea that will hopefully help millions find their green paths (and may it not become a leftout project).

This is what we keep writing about over an over: mapped business are top-ranked. The reason is not that being on a map is cuter than simply having a Website. Nor is it that geographers are really influential people.

The Web was born world wide, aka any info anywhere retrievable and displayable in front of your eyeballs. Google broke through and became the leader in the search space simply because it was the best at making sense out of this mass of content. In its quest for better search, Google realized that while it was cool to search the world wide web for content, people were intuitively more interested in what was around them (in most cases). More specifically, they want to have more info about the thing that surrounds them.

Hence Google’s focus on geo-technologies and location-aware devices. We often blog about Google’s obsession for geo-related info, because our product helps you be part of this game.

Today, another milestone is being reached, with Google announcing that they will now suggest businesses around your search query on top of their results page, even if there is no location specified in your search query:

We like to make search as easy as we can, so we’ve just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don’t type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you.

Google will mainly base its geo-targeted results in your IP address to determine your location, but they also have other tools to know where you are, like Gears, Chrome, and maybe partnerships with live web services that specialize in tracking where you are and what you do.

After adding walking directions a few weeks ago, Google Maps is now bringing a simplified layout to its Maps. The announcement starts by 3 words that could be Google’s motto: “less is more”. Basically, the map displayed is a little bigger, and the search box stands on top of the map. This means less cluster, more room, and a friendlier way to surf maps in general.

While Google Maps’ main challenge is to bring the whole wide world to the world wide Web, the challenge for RIA built on top of Google Maps is to the right ergonomy to squeeze in additional information: listings, marker descriptions, geographic information… As Frederic Lardinois from RWW mentions, “now that the tabs are gone, there is a stronger focus on the search form“. Good point. I guess that once again, even for online maps, search is going to be the dominant behavior to find geographic information (instead of listings or marker designs for example). At least this makes sense in a Google world.

xavierv