An unofficial blog that watches Google's attempts to move your operating system online since 2005. Not affiliated with Google.

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October 17, 2007

Google Maps Goes Social

Another piece from Google's social project has been released: Google Maps becomes social with the addition of user profiles. Until now, users could create personalized maps and write reviews for local businesses, but they didn't have an identity. Google Maps uses the same profiles from Shared Stuff and the same user IDs, so these profiles will probably added to all Google services to provide the integration.

Google Maps and Google Earth build a solid geographic platform that can be used to define your world and see how it intersect with other people's worlds. You can broadcast your presence with tools like Jaiku, annotate the places you visit, expand your world with places suggested by people that have similar interests, understand the life from other countries and find what's hot in your neighborhood. Google Earth could have a new layer that's more interesting than videos, sounds or pictures: people.



5 comments:

  1. While this is a good step towards building a social network glue that will bind its different services together, adding a "profile" page to its service is just the start. There should be reasons compelling enough (i'm not saying that there is, or isn't, at this point) for the users to "join" this google social network. Google indeed looks like a company with a focus on social networking these days, but we mus understand that a social network is only as good as the number of users that will join.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Not quite soup yet:

    Not Found
    The requested URL /help/maps/profile/index.html?utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-mapshpp-na-us-prf&utm_medium=mapshpp was not found on this server.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I remembered that it is often necessary to sign out of Google and back in to get new features. Now it works.

    ReplyDelete
  4. The best World places on google maps and google earth.

    www.videomap.it

    ReplyDelete
  5. A similar social network that is using google maps:

    http://www.atlaspost.com/main.php

    ReplyDelete

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