

Google Map Mashups are About to Get a Lot Better - j053003
http://www.41latitude.com/post/626468005/google-maps-map-styles

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simonw
CloudMade have been offering this based on top of OpenStreetMap for quite a
while (over a year I think) - I imagine the competition there was one of the
principle drivers behind adding this feature to Google Maps. There was a panel
on mapping at SxSW 2009 with representatives from OpenStreetMap and Google
Maps and the OSM presentations were much, much more impressive thanks to this
kind of feature. I'm not surprised Google felt the need to catch up.

If you want complete control over your maps, check out Tile Drawer -
<http://tiledrawer.com/> \- it lets you define your own map styles using a
Cascadenik stylesheet, then run your own EC2 instance that will render and
serve custom tiles for a specific area using those custom styles (and
OpenStreetMap data).

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jasonkester
It's been interesting to watch the Google Maps API as it rode from "The
Coolest thing EVER" in 2004 to the non-issue status it holds today.

Back in the day, companies were getting tens of millions in funding to build
apps where users could place pins on a map. That says a lot about the hype
surrounding it, since that's essentially the app you got when you pasted their
sample code into your IDE and hooked it up to a database.

Today, it's just expected that any application you build will have a GMaps
implementation somewhere in it, but it's just old-hat. I actually run one of
those GMaps-based startups from back in the day, and I haven't kept up on the
latest API changes for years.

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zach
I've been looking for a no-impact Javascript-API black-and-white map ever
since I started putting heat maps on them, and this is (typically for the Maps
API team) way more powerful. My favorite announcement of the week for my
startup.

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ericd
Kind of cool, but I think it's actually a mistake to customize an important
map much - showing a person a google map lets them know exactly what it is
immediately, and they can jump right in. Showing them a Google map that
doesn't look like a Google map seems like you could make minor gains in
usability in one way, but you're paying a large learnability penalty in the
other. Overall, if it's a business project, you'd better have a damn good
reason for it.

~~~
showerst
On the flip side to that, many people nowadays use google maps to show things
unrelated to navigation.

When you're trying to pinpoint locations that aren't street addresses, or show
large area overlays, all that extraneous information is distracting, and works
against usability.

It'll also be great to finally be able to show a map that's not jarringly
obviously from a third party provider. (I'm totally cool with the small google
logo/copyrights, but the color scheme just screams 'outside embed').

~~~
ericd
Yeah, there are definitely cases when it makes sense, but I think that the
majority of times when people think it's a good idea to make something look
custom, it's actually not when looked at from a usability perspective.

I realize that I'm in the minority about this when I look around and see most
of my competitors customizing the look of their markers, etc, but I think they
just make it worse most of the time. This is granting much more power in that
department.

I'm happy for the power, I just vehemently disagree that this is going to make
map mashups much better overall.

I don't think "outside embed" is a bad thing when viewed from the eyes of the
user - it's comforting familiarity for many. Making it seem custom is just an
ego trip.

