Where's the Google Maps love?

I was playing around in Google Maps today and I found you can save maps with all kinds of locations, drawings, video and pics, etc. Then you can share them out.

So, an example might be, if you wanted to give someone directions to a specific government building or something. You could save a map that had one waypoint for the parking lot, and another for the front door to the building. You could also include a photo of the building itself so people would know what it looked like, as well as notes like "Front door is always locked, go around the back."

I think we should all be making and sharing these.

You can take several of them and overlay them, so for instance you could search for a location, overlay S-Bahn and U-Bahn stops, and then "search near" your final destination for the nearest train.
VBS.de already does a lot of this but with this approach we get the advantage of user-customized instructions.

Any takers? Anyone have any useful saved maps?

This is a clever way by which google serves people and also gets info for feeding its maps. Maps services are mostly available in full form for U.S...But for other countries, it cant do all the stuff...So, this is also a strategy for releasing the maps API for users tp create their own, so they can cache them and use it...For most of third world countries, they cant do much...So, if some developers or any other people create and save maps, google uses them.

But its a good strategy and useful for both google and the users. And there are so many creative applications comin' up everyday..!

For example, you can see the real time train status from this site called swisstrains , which is one of the applications which uses google maps..! :-)

Interesting, the way life (virtual life) is evolving...!

You can do a lot of very cool things with Google Maps, but unfortunately they've overlooked one important aspect – the maps themselves are abysmally rubbish. A group of school children could produce better something better than the squiggles that Google call maps.

Compare for example this little section of central Munich; guess which is Google Maps and which is Hot-Maps.

Gotta say, for following road directions, I prefer the one on the right. The one on the left is too cluttered. Yeah there is useful info on there but 9 times out of ten, I just want to see the roads. I can always switch to hybrid if I want a better idea of the lay of the land.

I see your point though.

The Hotmaps one has a lot more content, obviously.
If you can add and share user content then it would be superior...can you do that though?

Also the hotmap of Stuttgart is not really more precise than the road atlas I got at a gas station. Maybe there's a bit of a learning curve...when I zoomed in I didn't get more precision, the map just got "bigger."

No, Google Maps is better in terms of features, but Hot-Maps is better in terms of content. Hot-Maps don't cover all towns and cities as of yet, but they're slowly adding to their collection. Google covers everywhere, but badly. Stadtplandient is a compromise that covers the whole country.

Here is an example. (apparently we can't embed iframes on Toytown or you could just see the map here).

I have to take a Security+ exam next week. Here are the locations nearby around Stuttgart. I could add all kinds of extra info. If you have saved maps (or just your home location saved, for example) then it takes a lot of work out of it for you.

For all of its added content, HotMaps seems to think that they flooded the English Garden. WTF?

Google maps is still evolving..It takes LOADS OF time to get and hold all the info (just imagine all the buildings, streets, villages, towns, cities, other landmarks of the world ..and all that info contained by a single firm with its resources (it probably needs many buildings of servers) to hold it and make it convenient for the users...!

By the way, there's this friends place of mine in frankische-schweiz (franconian swiss) and they have this pool in their garden...That tiny pool (from satellite-eye perspective) can be seen from google maps...Aint that wonderful?!?!

Bizarre what they've done to the English Gardens, although to be fair Google Maps had forgotten to mark any of the paths in the southern section. They've now removed all of them.

True, but even if the map portion of Google Maps is incomplete, the satellite and especially the hybrid views make of for it, IMO. I mostly travel by bike and MVV and if I'm planning a journey, making mental notes of placemarkers is very useful for me.

That said, Google Maps only displays S-, U-, and Eisenbahn stations, but not buses or trams, and for that HotMaps definitely has an advantage (or my trusty, old fashioned, printed MVG Stadtplan).

Interesting, if you go to hot-maps.de and enter Munich and just move to the English garden, there's no flooding visible.

Aye it's the satellite and hybrid views that really make it for me. And for that, it is awesome.

...which is exactly why I think that Toytown users should be putting that info in there.

Then when you search, it will also include user-created content.

Example, if you center on Stuttgart right now and search for "Weinachts Markt" then you won't find anything. But if I make a big zone around the Schlossplatz and mark it "Weinachts Markt," add in some photos, and a brief explanation, then you could find it all with a simple search. You could overlay maps that had bus and train routes and make your trip planning really, really simple.

just for gags...check the following link :

Huge Bug Threatens Google Maps

There is also maps.live.com with a cool Bird's Eye View.

English Garden
With Bird's Eye View

For some reason I always forget about MS's Local Live. I actually hadn't gone back there in a long time. My neighborhood looks amazing from it!

The Munich shots must have been taken a while ago, as the big holes for the drilling of the second pedestrian tunnels at the Marienplatz U-Bahnhof are still quite visible at Marienhof (among other things).

Here are some links to Google map content created by TT's don_riina:

Marienplatz in Bird's Eye View

The cool thing is that you can actually rotate the view :-)

Marienplatz - different angle

Coool, isn't it??

For whatever reason, Google pushes all of its extra information out through Google Earth, evidently preferring to use Maps purely for transportation info, and as a development platform. If you want zillions of landmarks, photos, and a great interface, Google Earth is the best thing around. For printable maps, not so much.

My current favorite Google Earth overlay - photos from Flickr. Too many users are wannabe-artists, but some of the photos are useful or interesting.
http://kmlphotos.metaltoad.com/