Google Mapplets Plot Personalized Data

By Geoff Duncan Published July 11, 2007

Google has officially launched its Mapplets add-ons to Google Maps, a new collection of tools and mini-applications which enable users to layer third-party data—like real estate listings, events, photos, gas prices, and even YouTube videos—directly onto Google Maps. Originally announced in May when Google debuted street-level photography in Google Maps, the new tools are directly accessible within Google Maps—click the “Add Content” link in the My Maps tag in Google Maps—and users can save the customized maps in their own personal library.

The new Mapplets bring to Google Maps a capability which has long been exploited in the Google Earth desktop application: the capability to plot customized information (or data from third parties) onto the maps for analysis, route planning, or just for fun. Google is launching the service with over 100 mapplets available, including Mapplets which pull live weather and traffic information, display hotel pricing, plot the locations of accessible Webcams, show the locations of tagged Flickr photos, and show the locations of local events. Google has also developed a seies of its own Mapplets, including a real estate search which toes into Google Base, YouTube videos uploaded from around the world, and location-tagged photos from Panoramio. Users can also display data using multiple mapplets, potentially uncovering interesting geographic correlations between data sets—for instance, real estate values and crime statistics, or sporting events and traffic tie-ups.

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Google has also posted developer documentation so programmers can create their own Mapplets.

Mapplets are currently available to Google Maps users in the U.S., the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia; several localized versions are also available, including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish, Russian, and Chinese.

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This new Google Docs feature is exactly what I’ve always wanted

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As a writer of a certain age, I've lived a lot of life in Google Docs. It's where my first drafts go, but it's also where my crazy ideas, unhinged brainstorming, and research dumps go.
There’s so many conveniences about Google Docs that make it my go-to for word processing, but let’s be honest: It’s still fairly barebones, especially when it comes to organizing and managing different files within Google Drive. But this new feature makes all of that much easier, keeping it all contained all within Docs itself.
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The idea is simple: It lets you create multiple documents within a single Docs file. Create as many “tabs” or separate documents as a single project might need, and switch between them extremely fast. That accessibility to them is really where the gold is. No more switching between different browser tabs.
It’s even more handy on mobile, of course, where switching applications or tabs is even more cumbersome. Here, you’ll find Document Tabs hovering just at the bottom of the screen with some simple arrows to flip between your different tabs. All we need now is a simple gesture to be added to flip between them even more seamlessly.
Document Tabs takes the place of the old outlining system, which would grab headers and automatically create a table of contents around them. I used this frequently, but it was pretty finicky. More than that, it resulted in overly long documents that I still found myself scrolling through.
Document Tabs is a really elegant solution to that problem. Whether it’s segmenting chapters in a book, multiple aspects of a project, or even just different parts of an article, it’s already become an extremely useful outlining and productivity tool for me.
It even had a pretty clean way of converting the tabs when you need to export. All the tabs do is combine down into one document, but they’re sectioned off with titles and some basic formatting. That’s not going to be ideal in every situation, of course, so it’s something to keep in mind if you need to export and share it with someone outside of Docs.
At the very least, though, it’s worth trying out. And if you’re a Google Docs fiend like I am, I have a feeling you’ll get quite a lot out of it.