Google Earth is almost a year old, and Google decided to throw an early birthday party by releasing the latest Beta version of the map product to coincide with Google’s Geodeveloper Day.
Greg Sterling was there yesterday, and runs down a session introduced by Google’s top 3 men (Larry Page, Eric Schmidt and Sergey Brin), which gives you an idea how important mapping and “geolocation” are to search in general and Google in specific. Said Schmidt, Big G is “investing heavily in the ‘core infrastructure’: better maps, faster servers, more local context and data.”
To that end, Google’s new version of Earth comes through. The official Google Blog says they’ve increased “global coverage by about 4X,” and now cover about 20 percent of the planet’s landmass in high res; their guess is that about 1/3 of the globe’s population could use Google Earth, say “I can see my house!” and really mean it. The interface in general is much improved, with navigation controls embedded in the map that hide when they’re not being used, a toolbar for stuff like email, print and measurement options, and a streamlined layers menu.
Google also stressed the importance of “participatory mapping” yesterday, and they’ve made it easier for eager Earth fans to help make the program better in a number of ways. For one, it’s fully functional in Italian, Spanish, German and French in addition to English. They’ve also added support for SketchUp (Google’s free 3D modeling program) so that users can add textured 3D buildings to the Google Earth landscape to replace the cool (but less fun) gray polygons that come with the program. We hope some good Samaritan starts with the Washington Monument; right now the building’s familiar pointy shadow is being cast by a square roof (’tain’t natural!).
We like what we see so far, but we may not have seen it at all if it hadn’t been for a federal judge’s actions Friday, says News.com. U.S. District Judge Douglas Woodlock refused to grant an injunction that would have blocked Google from distributing Google Earth. A Virginia company, Skyline Software Systems, says the Google application violates a patent the company holds called “Remote landscape display and pilot training” that involves overlaying photographic images on 3D terrain. Techdirt points out that a recent Supreme Court ruling may have played a part, and adds, “It’s good to see judges not automatically jumping forward with injunctions in patent disputes, and at least allowing the rest of the case to play out.”
