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July 12, 2005
I, for one, welcome our Google overlords.
So Google Earth is pretty crazy. Google Maps were crazy enough, but Google Earth turns it up a notch. Maybe not to 11, but close. The full version is probably at 11. And the "Google Earth Enterprise Client" is probably hovering somewhere around in the 15-20 range. Possibly higher.
Anyway, the regular version for mere mortals is pretty sweet, and quite adequate for my needs. I was checking out Schenectady today on Google Maps and I wanted some higher-res imagery, so I figured it was as good a time as any to fire up the old Pentium 4 and give it a go. Little did I know, that Google Earth is basically just sort of a stand-alone version of Google Maps, with some extra interface elements thrown in for good measure. No hi-res here. (Although, I think if you crank it up to 15 you get some added detail.) But hey, even without hi-res, the extra stuff they've thrown in is pretty cool. My favorite is the quasi-3D map tilting that lets you look at things from an angle rather than from directly overhead. Pretty sweet. The other big thing is that you can overlay all sorts of crazy data on top of the satellite imagery. Longitude and latitude, sure, roads, of course, but what about cemeteries, golf courses, mexican restaurants, and volcanos? Madness.
Obviously the next step (after releasing a Mac version, that is) would be to incorporate all of this stuff into Google Maps on the web. Besides the crazy 3D buildings thing they've got in the big cities and the absolutely incredible 3D stuff they've got going on in the Grand Canyon and other topographically interesting places, I think they can probably get most of the features of Google Earth running on Google Maps. Hell, people are already using the maps API to do some awesome stuff, and they're just schmoes sitting at their computers.
Anyway, yes. Clearly Google is becoming Skynet. So let me just be the first to say, Google, I have no idea where John Connor is. Please don't kill me.
Thank you.
Posted by pat at July 12, 2005 08:32 PM