We would like to announce that the Click2Map blog is moving to a new address: You can now find our bits of news about geomapping at http://click2map.hyveup.tv.

The feed url is also changing: http://feeds.feedburner.com/hyveup/click2map

Thank you to everyone for making the switch! See you on the other side!

So so weird!

Found via Best Viral.

It might be because Streetview needs a little positive advocacy these days, but the Google Maps team released a note on their blog about a new feature that leverages Streeview to display the image of a business on a map:

We use the position of the business on the map to approximately display it as a 3D marker in Street View. We are continuously working on improving the quality of the underlying map, and this will result in more and more businesses being positioned with high accuracy in Street View over time.

In other words, it’s not very precise. But it sounds pretty fun! Just have a look at the quick demo below to see how it works:

This looks pretty good, and it could be really useful on my cell phone. Unfortunately, I tried it on my Android and the same feature wasn’t there. Too bad, I could use this business-spotter when I find myself in unknown neighborhoods.

It is interesting to be a spectator of how Google pioneers augmented reality solutions for businesses. As mentioned above, the technology is somewhat clunky for the time being, but it clearly exemplifies Google Maps’ goal to own the virtual reality space, and sell it back to local businesses. I wonder if a business with no marketing budget for Google Maps will end up dying, given that our phones will become the best way for us to know where to go.

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?

Techcrunch just published an interesting post on the importance of a user-generated content strategy for Google Maps to expand. This goal is being achieved thanks to the map creation tool Map Maker from Google:

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.

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).

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.

I agree with Techcrunch writer MG Siegler who finds the operation :

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.

We often wrote about how local business owners should put themselves on the map. Now Google is trying to make it obvious.

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

Looking for a house online usually implies viewing dozens, even hundreds of pages to search for the perfect home. Quite an opportunity for ad networks with real estate-related inventories. According to the National Association of Realtors, 84% of home buyers search online.

On top of the real estate search are Trulia and Zillow. Roost (recently out of beta) operates in a smaller league in terms of popularity, but this real estate search engine was created by the team who launched Kayak, probably the most practical travel search engine on the Web. In a more offbeat philosophy, Realius offers to discover new homes through gaming.

Up until recently, those search engines were our destination to engage in a serious search for a home. Things could play out a little differently now that Google Maps launched a real estate search feature.

So, from today, if you enter a query like < > on Google Maps, you’ll see that we make it easy for you to see all your results on a map with a one-box that will take you to real estate listings. Previously, you had to specify “real estate” from the search options menu, but now we’re making it easier to find available listings

So is Google Maps getting in the real estate search business, and crushing smaller search engines in the process? Kind of. Obviously, the real estate search feature will very soon be integrated in Google’s universal search results. The one-box you see in the sidebar of Google Maps holds the same content that should be delivered in a classic results page. However, as Google states:

Is Google a broker? A national MLS?

We’re neither. Our role is to connect users as quickly as possible with the information they need. People come to us looking for all kinds of information, including housing listings, comparable pricing, and how to find an agent or broker in their area. In all cases, we want to deliver these users to the industry experts who can provide the most useful answers.

Google’s going to play it the way it always does: Google is the origin of a search online, sos real estate search professional will have to do two things to compete on Google’s grounds: 1. Connect their database to the Google’s Base to constantly provide Google with the freshest homes on sale; 2. Use Adwords to compensate for a weak natural search presence. If Google can show that real estate search very often start from google.com, then their real estate search feature opens a new multi-billion advertising revenue channel for the not evil-at-all search company.

On the other hand, this will probably highly increase the competition in the real estate search arena. First all search engines will need to hook up their database to Google, and obviously the largest players with heftier marketing budgets will monopolize the top searched keywords and until the competition dries out. I know, I’m oversimplifying.

How do you think smaller real estate search engines will adapt to this new real estate leads catalyst that Google is slowly unveiling?

Juan Carlos Perez brings up a good point today in PC World about the Google Maps developers’ community. Citing Ray Valdes - a Gartner analyst - the journalist explains how Google fails to create incentives around its Google Maps’ API:

“When you meet a developer in a social setting some will say ‘I’m an iPhone developer’ or ‘I’m a Facebook developer’ or ‘I’m a Microsoft .Net developer.’ It’s rare to hear a developer say ‘I’m a Google developer’ or ‘I’m an OpenSocial developer.’ Google needs to get to that level of engagement with developers,” Valdes added.

The cause identified by analysts is Google’s shaky platform coherence: Google products are hardly connected to one another, a real puzzle for developers who wish to integrate different products into one. Analysts see the Android mobile platform as Google products’ convergence point. Google Maps is Google’s gateway to the mobile phone - on Android and beyond - yet its developers’ community is held in muddy waters.

Google Maps already makes money through the mobile deals it inked worldwide. On the Web, businesses utilizing Google Maps at the core of their product have to be self-reliable to survive. Instead of nurturing its developers’ community, Google operates occasional purges, which brings the level of stress even higher.

One thing Google Maps could do is create a reward system. This would attract more entrepreneur-spirited minds into evangelizing the Google Maps’ technology:

“The number one thing that would help us as developers is more evangelism [...]; there are great opportunities out there, just not enough people popularizing them,” (PC World)

Google Maps could also share its mobile revenues with the developers who stimulate mobile usage with their applications. This strategy could only be beneficial to Google’s convergence towards mobile phones.