Google's MyMaps Observations

location based services

All quiet on the blogosphere regarding the release of Google's MyMaps feature. Either we are all suffering from a MyMaps euphoric hangover or people are busy trying to hack the new features. My guess is that the eerie silence is due to the latter.

However, I'm not sure how much useful hacking can be done to these new features. That's not to say that there are not improvements that can be made, but the features seem to be intended for an item-by-item placement of objects, whereas hacking usually involves batched or automated processes.

Things that I would like to see included in future versions of MyMaps include:

• Some automated attributes (line segment lengths, polygon areas, lat/long coordinates),
  
• the ability to customize icons, ability to include alpha-numeric values for icons ( e.g. 1, 10, 24c, A, b, IV etc).
  
• I hope to see GPS and basic GIS supported in GoogleMaps soon.
  
• Uploading or sourcing a GPX or Shape file seems basic enough and would meld nicely with the ability to display KML/KMZ's in the same manner
• I'm sure that it won't be too long until you will be sending your MyMaps maps via cell phone. I'm telling you now, as I've been saying for the past two years, it will be Google who has the platforms (GMaps, GEarth) and the financial resources to bring Location Based Services (LBS) into the mainstream.
• One really annoying thing about MyMaps and GoogleMaps in general is if you click on a link that takes you away from the GM page, when you return to the map you go back to the full extent of the map. When I click on a linked photo I have no options of opening in a new window or just seeing a larger image in the existing window, I can only go to that page or cancel. I can open it up in a new Firefox tab, but that is not yet intuitive for the average internet user.
  

All in all I think it's a great application that will truly bring introductory GIS concepts to the masses. ESRI I think has missed the boat again (last major one was GoogleEarth of course). Now I know that they say they are not competitors and that they have different models that offer different services, on and on. But I'm sure Jackie "D" is sweating a little knowing that little kids will be creating points, lines, and polygons in 1st grade and hacking the GMaps API by the 5th.