Google recently launched Street View for Google Maps, which integrates a street level view into the map. You can view some of the streets in San Francisco (click street view in the upper right hand modes).

The technology, which was an acquisition from Stanford, allows you to virtually drive down city streets. They apply blurs and 3D mapping to the images that makes for a seamless and smooth navigating experience.

Currently, they have good coverage of San Francisco, including most of the major streets in the entire SOMA district. This brings us one step closer to being able to virtually walk down any street in the US without the computer.

Now, if only they had a real time view so that I could figure out where all the empty parking spaces are next to my apartment before leaving work.

I was doing a few searches on Google Maps today, and noticed that they’ve added sponsored locations on the maps. For example, I did a search on a cafe called The Toaster Oven Sandwich Shop in SF, and was presented its location, along with two locations for Williams-Sonoma stores complete with a custom icon on the map.

I’m sure there will be complaints from the contextual ad haters. But, local advertising is a natural addition for Google to make.

I hate using the 511.org Trip Planner, which is the only integrated solution for mass transit trip planning in San Francisco. The interface and functionality can be maddening–maps are displayed separately from directions, locations can’t be saved, and the maps are horrible to navigate around in. I always end up using a combination of 511.org and Google Maps in order to fully plan out my trips.

Enter Google Transit, which may be the saviour for people that are tortured daily by mediocre local mass transit planning sites.

The interface for Transit is identical to Maps: you simply type in the origin and destination, and Google calculates the best route. In this case, however, Google assumes that you can use the local transit system. The result are directions to your destination broken out into walking and transit segments.

A nice feature is that Transit allows you to choose between different transit times–for example, you can either choose to board the bus at 1pm, or earlier at 12:30pm. The map and directions update instantly, complete with estimates of walking times.

Google Transit currently works on a few select transit systems, including Portland’s TriMet, Orange County’s OCTA, and Honolulu’s TheBus. I’m definitely going to keep my eye on Transit as it expands to other cities.

And, maybe, I’ll just be rid of 511.org for good.

When it comes to maps, the techie inside of me still loves Google Maps for its shear interactiveness. It was one of the first to employ draggable maps that would forever banish the use of those pesky arrow buttons. Even though I find that it can be a tad slower to load than Yahoo Maps, my personal choice for maps is still Google Maps.

But what about all those sites that have store locating interfaces? For most, you’re either stuck using web 1.0 style non-draggable interfaces, or, copying the address to Google Maps. Blipster, which just recently launched, aims to bring affordable mapping solutions built on Google Maps to all businesses.

Now that superb services like Google Maps have opened up their APIs, small and agile development teams can compete with the age-old mapping incumbants. Blipstar’s tactic is to penetrate the store locating market with low prices by leveraging Google Maps. In fact, I’m suprised that there aren’t many others doing the same thing–blipstar appears to be the first.

Blipstar allows businesses to enter data manually, or using an Excel sheet in a particular format that blipstar understands. After uploading the location data, blipstar hosts and stores the map data. All the business needs to do is link to their blipstar map page to allow their visitors to search for stores nearby. The style of the store locations page can be changed to suit the business.

When I tried out making my own store locater, blipstar was clearly having some technical issues, as I couldn’t browse to my store locator due to javascript errors. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon. The screenshots I took below are from the demo, which does work.

The interface as it stands is pretty functional for users, allowing them to quickly see different store locations relative to their location on a Google Map. One complaint I have is that when users request directions to a store, the ending address is given in GPS coordinates, which is not so user friendly. Another major concern is that the interface isn’t completely cross browser compliant, as I had to switch from Opera to IE in order for it to work. For high volume business customers, compatibility issues like these aren’t going to fly.

blipstar charges $25 for 25 locations, $50 for up to 60 locations, and $90 for up to 250 locations. Their prices are reasonable for business owners who aren’t technical enough to dabble in APIs and web programming. Overall, blipstar has the right core values–they just need to streamline their interface and work out the technical issues.

For all of you who thought that we here at BuzzShout weren’t worldly people, this post is for you. Maporama, based out of Paris, France, has jumped into the world of Web 2.0 with their updated site. They have a new AJAX interface with a customizable homepage that allows users to choose from 31 map styles, decide the sizes of the display maps, and have their itineraries included on the page.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, the Maporama site has a BETA section that has an itinerary calculator with real-time traffic information. Also, the user can click on specific parts of their route to see what the road situation is going to be like. Caveat: these services are only available in the company’s hometown region of Paris, France.

Probably the coolest new addition to the site is the ability to make one click and upload directions from the site to your MP3 player/iPod or mobile phone. They can be shown in text or be transformed into audio. Dominique Grillet, the CEO of Maporama International, says, “The strength of our website, and what will make it a reference in the web 2.0 world, is also related to the perfect control of our cartographic databases and to our capacity to improve the user experience.”

Now, I haven’t tried the site myself, but would love to hear what our loyal European BuzzShout users think of it. Do Mapquest and Google Maps have something to worry about here?

OpenStreetMap is leveraging the community to produce geographical data. In many parts of the world, this data is not free, and is subject to ownership by government agencies (this is not true in the USA, where it is free). OpenStreetMap lets users freely edit maps online in a wiki fashion, sharing their knowledge and experience of local geographies.

Currently, the project is focused on European geographics, where places like Dublin and Glasgow are actively being mapped by users. They’re still early in their development, so coverage won’t be as good as the standard maps out there, but they hope to increase coverage as the project moves along.

Maps are draggable via a Google Maps style interface, and editing is done using a Java engine. The interface is a bit clunky and slow at this point, which I hope they’ll be able to resolve in the future. Zooming in and out takes way too much time, which could deter people from making extensive edits.

A major question that many people ask is, why not use Google Maps instead? They explain the intricacies in their FAQ:

Most hackers around the world are familiar with the difference between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech”. Google Maps are free as in beer, not as in speech.

If your project’s mapping needs can be served simply by using the Google Maps API, all to the good. But that’s not true of every project. We need a free dataset which will enable programmers, social activists, cartographers and the like to fulfil [sic] their plans without being limited either by Google’s API or by their Terms of Service

So really, the OpenStreetMap project aims to go beyond any mapping service in terms of freedom of use. The real question then is, will there be enough map geeks out there who have the skills to do this? They do provide a service where users can upload points taken on a GPS, but I don’t think I’ll ever trust myself to freehand any roads on a map.

On the tails of Wikipedia, Wikitravel, and Rrove comes WikiMapia, which allows visitors to annotate, tag, and describe places directly on the Google map interface. It’s definitely a neat idea–instead of surfing Wikitravel to find a particular place via reading text, you can surf around an area of the map on WikiMapia and view descriptions of interesting locations.

Each location has a “card” that holds information about it. Users can choose to view the card, and edit it if they like. Like any good Wiki, each card also has the history of edits.

Currently, there doesn’t seem to be many places with in depth descriptions. In fact, I see a lot of the cards simply referencing the corresponding Wikipedia article. It would be worthwhile for WikiMapia to somehow get access to Wikipedia’s database (and location data), if possible, and simply grab the article and place it in the card description, if possible. That way, some of the information will already be filled in.

The useful case is when people start filling in locations that are interesting, but relatively unknown, like the hidden niches in cities, parks, and other areas. This is exactly what the blog Google Sightseeing is doing, except that WikiMapia could leverage the network effects of the Wiki system to find a whole slew of cool locations. After WikiMapia matures, they should aggregate the most interesting locations and report them on a blog or a front page, a bit like what del.icio.us has recently done with their front page redesign.

The UI for WikiMapia was a bit clunky for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m on a slower machine, but it took quite a while to get some of their UI elements working (even though Google Maps usually zips along on my machine). Their next step should be making the entry box and UI more user friendly, which will encourage people to submit more locations.

Good luck to the WikiMapia team, and keep working at their system. WikiMapia could turn out to be a great resource, especially if they open up their API.

[Thanks to Steve Rubel for the pointer]