Google Announces the Ultimate Mapping Weapon: Mapplets

Are you fed up with the inability to find crop circles on your PDA through Google Maps? Well, you're not the only one. Google, heeding the call to further digitize our existence, released today the first phase of Mapplets, Widgets added to Google Maps.

These widgets are really specialized maps embedded within other maps. These widgets allow the user to search for locations of landmarks, transit systems, crime stats, cheap gas prices, nearest crop circles, recent earthquakes, hotels, where to play badminton in Hamburg (finally!) and a multitude of additional services you can't live without. These personalized mapplets can be saved by location, have notes added to them, and then shared with other people.

This is another step in Google's quest for world domination as it leaves former front runners in the online mapping world, MapQuest and Yahoo Maps, in the dust.

Most mapplets are created by Google itself, and the selection's a little limited now, but the number of mapplets is expected to grow massively in the coming days and weeks. Google's also released an application interface for programmers to work with, meaning it shouldn't be long before dozens of user-created mapplets start to pop up all over the place locating all sorts of things you probably didn't know you'd ever care to find. Mapplets are expected to explode over the online map world, creating a new kind of social net. One where the average technophile can conceivably show the world all the fast food restaurants they've eaten at in the past week or where they think the best McDonald's are.

When I downloaded the application to my PDA while in the passenger seat of my friend's car, the power of mapplets became self-evident. The combination of the "Gas Prices" mapplet and the Traffic service provided by Google, you could work out the most penny-wise place to buy your petroleum while avoiding traffic jams and therefore saving more on gas. I also searched for apartments in New York City, where I saw projects in Queens marked on the map along with local crime rates or school locations.

The opportunity for businesses to take advantage of the service is also massive - for instance, allowing a mapplet to be activated to show where every Subway restaurant in the world is located.

Google's Director of Maps, John Hanke, summed up the service best when he said: "It's like combining chocolate and peanut butter. They're good by themselves, but the combination is much more valuable than when they are served in isolation." Yes, no longer will mankind have to look in two places to find Crop Circles and Club Top Venues!