The future of mapping - Google building on success

Anyone wondered about where mapping is going? *This article relates to consumer mapping not enterprise mapping.

Years ago the Internet gave birth to what can only be described as a ‘New World’ for mapping.  First it was companies like Multimap and MapQuest that forged a path into the new world.  Initially these maps were by todays standards simply a copy and paste from paper to digital image.

For years the focus was largely on building a business model around these pioneers, enhancing satellite images and routing details.

Then seemingly out of no where Google introduced their vision of mapping utilising what later became known as AJax.  AJax was not new but was CPU intensive so until Google used this method in a major product launch no one had used AJax seriously (Gmail was in private invitation only beta so I didn’t count them).

This advancement in hindsight was largely due to the rapid and significant advancements made to servers, which were then powerful enough to deal with the greater load that AJax requires and stunted its growth until that point.

We zip for a few years and we have Yahoo! hopping on board, mobile versions being created with prior pioneers either being bought or advancing on their own but with very little grasp of just how different the market they pioneered is today.

This is a big breakthrough!

Today Google announced a new feature that allows the citizens of the world (grandiose I know) to add and amend the maps of specific countries, such as Jamaica (full country list), this ‘crowdsourcing’ should ease the burden on Google to provide up-to-date maps for countries that are poorly mapped such as Kazakhstan.

But my question is where is mapping going to go from here?  I personally love maps and have for a few years now considered buying old maps for collector reasons and because of this I would really really love it if I could click a ‘history’ bar and scroll through time and even do a comparison of borders over a specific area of land.

Imagine if you could look through history and watch the lines of Europe change over the centuries, and what if you could perform a search based on the area and year of which you are reviewing.  How would this impact research, education, culture…?

I would really love to hear your thoughts so I encourage you to hit the comments below and offer your thoughts!