Thursday, April 5. 2007

Google My Maps: The Business Case

By now you've read that Google now offers drawing tools so we regular, non-programmer types can put dots on maps and do our own pubic or private mashups. Stefan at Ogle Earth offers a nice intro/comparison with Virtual Earth/Live Search/Live Local and Frank at Google Earth Blog focuses on the importance of KML. As Frank makes clear, the data is created in KML, making it useable in Google Earth and other products. And, importantly, making it searchable via KML, about which I've been on about for some time. To be fair, while cool, this is a bit late since Microsoft has had collections and other goodies for some time.

But, let's not forget the business side of this new offering. Per Red Herring, "With the launch, user-generated content will begin appearing below main map search results." Oh, this is about user-generated content and filling in holes where Google does not yet have Google Maps! It's about adding content Google would not acquire/create like bird-watching sites! It's about making that user generated content easily createable and spatially searchable! This is all good for Google - more content means more searches means more eyeballs means more ads means more revenue... Let us not forget Google is in large part advertising company.

Another side to the business case is that many of Google's developers have offered this sort of functionality for some time using the Google Maps API - I'm thinking of apps from GMaps Pedometer to Platial to Tagzania. Will it drive those folks "out of business" (some of these and others are folks in basements, while others are well funded)? No, not necessarily, and Google doesn't really want that - it wants more sites with more maps to show more ads. What these new funcations do mean is that regular folks need not know of these other websites to put their important "dots on the map." Moreover, I think the allure of having their data be searchable can be compelling. Just like we can find individuals' top ten sci-fi books on Amazon, now we'll be able to find strangers' favorite pizza places in Seattle.

It's worth noting, as the AP did, that Google Maps is still in third place in terms of visitors when it comes to mapping sites:

Google's maps already are a big draw, with 22.2 million U.S. visitors during February, according to the most recent data available from comScore Media Metrix. That ranked Google maps third in its category, trailing AOL's Mapquest (45.1 million visitors) and Yahoo (29.1 million visitors).

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google at 07:25 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |

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I see this as a positive move towards a wider adoption of the concept of personal geography, and we see opportunities there for Tagzania. It's also interesting to see Google catching up with concepts that we had clear when we launched in 2005: create your maps, adopt GeoRSS... Obviously, we have to push further, be ahead of Google is like an interesting challenge.

#1 Luistxo Fernandez (Link) on 2007-04-05 13:46 (Reply)

With regards to the stats showing Google in third place with 22.2 million US visitors verses Mapquest and Yahoo, there are two very important points missing:

1) These are US statistics. Google Maps is available in many different languages and has detailed street maps for many countries. My guess is Google Maps is already the most popular mapping tool worldwide.

2) The US stats don't include Google Earth's millions of users. I suspect if that were included Google's US ranking would be higher.

Frank Taylor
Google Earth Blog

#2 Frank Taylor on 2007-04-05 14:53 (Reply)

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