Google Maps - Mapplets

August 2nd, 2007 | Joel | Web Services

Google Maps has come a long way with it’s satellite photographs, Traffic report, My Maps, and Street View. Now let’s prepare our selves for Mapplets.

Mapplets provides the user’s My Maps menu with additional tools. Some of the tools, or Mapplets, are provided by Google and others are third party tools. Let’s take a look at these tools provided as of this writing.

Google Real Estate Search

With Google Real Estate Search, you are able to search for nearby real estate for sell. Search options that are given to the user are:

• Type of Listing
• Location
• Price Range
• Beds
• Baths
• Keywords

Photos from Panoramio

Many of us have used Panoramio with Google Earth. Now the same service can be found in Google Maps. The services works the same way as in Google Earth except that instead of a bubble pointing to the land mark, a tiny thumbnail of the actual image is hovering over the location.

Gas Prices from Gasbuddy

The Gasbudy tool is my personal favourite. Enter your zipcode and suddenly you are shown local gas prices at different gasoline stations. The information is show as a pinpoint above most gas station. Not all gasoline stations are shown due to lack of information at the Gasbuddy site.

NOTE: The Gasbuddy takes information from its users, information such as gasoline station location and gasoline prices, and displays this information on their site. If gasoline prices are not reported to the site then there is no way of knowing the gas price of these particular stations. Thus, not all gasoline stations will be listed on Google’s Gasbuddy tool.

Distance Measurement Tool

The distance tool is especially useful for people who walk or cycle a lot. This tool allows you to draw a line on the map by simply clicking around. It then calculates the total length of the path in either miles or kilometres. I will definitely use this tool next time I go hiking.

Our Earth as Art

Our Earth as Art is quite interesting. It shows, with photography, beautiful land masses and under the sea reefs. Along with these images, a brief description is provided describing the area and subject of the photo in terms of art. Links are also provided as to were you can receive more information.

Crop Circles

The Crop Circles tool lists known crop circles from around the world. All the crop circles can be used using Google’s satellites photography. In reality, this tool doesn’t really have a useful purpose unless your conducting a study on crop circles are just curious about the subject and want to see neat crop circle designs.

 

That concludes our look at Google’s new Mapplets. Do not forget to view the images at the right of each description. The thumbnails will lead you to the full image.