Google Maps Integrates Flickr Photos
Google Maps added user photos from Panaramio to Street View last year. They started with photos around major landmarks and added user photos for all their Street Views as well as maps without Street View. Now geo-tagged, user-submitted Flickr photos as well as other location-specific photos from Google’s own Picasa are more a part of Google Maps’ offerings than ever: Google’s adding new ways to find the photos and better integrating them with their own street-level views.
The new integration will show the user photos just like it used to (accessible through a thumbnail shot in the upper-right), but it will also interconnect the user photos. If they have a better shot of a Street View or user photo, an “orb” will appear in the image when a user rolls their mouse over it. Click on the orb to see the better view.
Google uses its recognition and matching technology to identify views of the same building and link them to the maps. They also put an orb on adjacent images if they have a better view of those.
Read Write Web points out this may be a direct challenge to Bing’s Maps with Photosynth, originally integrated into Microsoft’s maps offering in 2008.
As always, Google explains with a video, too:
In other Google Maps news, they’re also offering a service to try to help locate loved ones in the aftermath of the Chile earthquake this weekend.
What do you think? Is this a Bing Maps killer—and does Google really need one?
Google Launches Easily Embeddable Web Elements at I/O 2009
The only really exciting thing you missed by not attending Google’s I/O 2009 developer event was the chance to get a free Android phone–apparently Google can give them away after all! 
The annual event is not as glamorous as Google’s other conferences, but if you dream in binary, then the chance to mingle with 3,000 other developers and listen to 130+ speakers would have been a delight for you.
For the rest of us, Google did make three announcements today.
Perhaps the most interesting for us non-developer types, Google Web Elements allow you to incorporate Google products–like Maps, News, Friend Connect and YouTube–right onto your own website. They require no programming knowledge; all you need to do is use the customization wizard and Google automatically generates a snippet of text to paste on your page.
It works like this:
And looks like this:
The other two announcements may cause drowsiness…
- Java Language Support in App Engine: Today Google is launching general availability of Java language support in Google App Engine, providing all developers with an end-to-end Java language solution for building AJAX web applications.
- Android Developer Challenge 2: Today Google is announcing the second phase of the Android Developer Challenge, a Google-funded initiative to reward developers for building innovative and useful applications for the Android mobile platform.
