Killer Maps

technologyreview.com
October 2005
Killer Maps
By Wade Roush

Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo are racing to transform online maps into full-blown browsers, organizing information -- and, of course, ads -- according to geography. The likely winner? You.

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And now consumers have access to advanced geographical visualization tools such as Google Maps, launched by the search giant in February, and Google Earth, released in June. With their combination of detailed aerial and satellite maps, high-powered graphics and animation, comprehensive local search functions, and hackability--it's child's play for programmers to display their own data atop Google maps--the new programs make paper maps and previous generations of online mapping tools seem primitive. (Click here for a slide show on fun ways to use Google Earth.)

"I describe it as a browser for the earth," John Hanke, general manager of Google's Keyhole group, says of Google Earth. Keyhole, where Hanke was CEO until Google acquired the company last year, developed the software upon which Google Earth is based, mostly for customers in defense, engineering, and real-estate investing. Now that Keyhole is part of Google, the idea is to use geography as a fundamental structural principle for the entire Web. "The interesting part is not necessarily the core map but the information from the Web that's now being organized geographically, so that you can get to it and understand it in its proper context," says Hanke.

It's such a potentially lucrative idea, in fact, that Microsoft has followed suit, introducing its own search-and-mapping service called MSN Virtual Earth. The service offers satellite photos, zooming and panning abilities, and interactive search listings resembling those of Google Earth, but it may actually reach a wider audience than Google's product, since it runs inside a browser window rather than needing to be downloaded as a separate application. Yahoo, too, is in the game: last year it introduced maps that provide, say, the locations of all the coffee shops with Wi-Fi hot spots within a particular neighborhood.

Crucially, each company has released instructions for out-side programmers--called application programming interfaces (APIs)--that let them build online services that tap into the company's own map programs. Developers are taking advantage of the new APIs to put out geospatial applications such as geobloggers.com and chicagocrime.org. The fact that these "mash-ups" are so easy to make is giving rise to a community of mapmakers and map users who are busy geotagging every piece of place-related information they can put their hands on. And the more information on the Web that's tied to geographical coordinates, the better the results--and the better targeted the ads--that can be served up in response to location-driven searches.

The mapping revolution could, in short, change the way we think of the World Wide Web. We've long spoken of the Web as if it were a place--with "sites" that we "go to"--but as places go, it's been a rather abstract, disembodied one. Now that's changing. Geotagging means the Web is slowly being wedded with real space, enhancing physical places with information that can deepen our experiences of them and making computing into a more "continuous" part of our real lives (see "Social Machines," August 2005).

For example, users of smart phones and wireless PDAs with location technologies such as Global Positioning System chips may soon be able to automatically retrieve stories, photos, videos, or historical accounts related to their current locations, along with ads and listings for nearby shopping, dining, entertainment, and business outlets.

And the information is already flowing both ways: users can upload their own texts, photographs, and other data to the Internet and pin them to specific latitudes and longitudes. "Historically, maps were a 'read-only' medium," says Schuyler Erle, chief engineer at Locative Technologies and coauthor of Mapping Hacks. "Maps were only created by professional cartographers and professional GIS [geographic information systems] people. What has happened because of Moore's Law is that people now have the computing power on their desktops to manage the vast amounts of data that are required for digital cartography. Maps are increasingly a 'read-write' medium. That changes how we interact with them and the impact they can have on our everyday lives."

Many details of the emerging geospatial Web have yet to be worked out. No one knows which location-finding technologies are right for consumers or which will be endorsed by cellular carriers and device makers. Only a few of the U.S. cellular networks currently sell phones with GPS chips, and only one, Nextel, actually makes its phones' GPS functions accessible to software developers. Outside North America, the mapping revolution may take longer, since some foreign governments maintain strict control over map data or charge exorbitantly for it.

But none of that is damping excitement in the community of Web developers and e-commerce managers. In June, more than 500 executives, programmers, and professionals, including some from traditional GIS companies such as San Diego's Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI), converged on San Francisco for Where 2.0, a new conference organized by tech-book publisher O'Reilly Media. Participants spent two days admiring one another's latest mapping creations and strategizing over how to convert geographic information delivered over the Web into actual transactions--from simply clicking on an advertisement to buying a house.

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Annotating the Planet
As the big three vie for Web users' loyalty, they're likely to introduce more ways for people to import their own data and see it displayed on professional-looking maps. Google Earth Plus, an enhanced subscription version of the program, allows users to upload and view data collected by their GPS units, such as "tracklogs," series of virtual bread crumbs showing where the user has been.

And other companies are getting into the mix. A program for Nextel GPS camera phones, Trimble Adventure Planner, helps users create online travelogues by uploading photographs and pinning them to the appropriate spots on a Web map.

Siemens, meanwhile, is developing software that will let a GPS-enabled mobile device associate notes with specific coordinates; when someone else with a similarly programmed gadget approaches the coordinates, the note appears on his or her screen. A tourist bureau might "label" a particular spot along San Francisco's Embarcadero as the site of a fatal duel in August 1879. John Udell, a columnist for InfoWorld, has coined a phrase for this phenomenon: "annotating the planet."

It's a trend that the main providers of mapping platforms have every incentive to encourage. After all, as the history of the Web itself has shown, interesting content draws more traffic, which drives more click-throughs. "The world is really dense with information," says Schuyler Erle. "Access to ubiquitous networking and location-finding services means that we can take that information and make it accessible in the places we are actually in, when we need it, and that allows us to make much more intelligent decisions on the spot, at that time."

Every page on the Web has a location, in the form of a URL. Now every location can have a Web page--indeed, an infinite stack of them. That may sound like a recipe for information overload. But in fact, it means that navigating both the Web and the real geography around us is about to become a much richer experience, rife with occasions for on-the-spot education and commerce. It means that we will be able to browse the Web--and the virtual earth encompassed within it--simply by walking around.

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