A few months ago we were delighted when Google used Nestoria as the Google Maps API case study. It was a real honour for our little team, especially in the context of how many interesting uses of Google Maps there are (for those that don’t already know of Google Maps Mania, I recommend subscribing. It’s a great blog that regularly features new projects around the world using Google Maps).
Since then we’ve been getting a lot of questions about Google Maps and how we use them on Nestoria. It’s hard to believe that only two and a half years ago Google maps, and the intense innovation it spawned in online cartography, didn’t exist. Amazing how far we’ve come. Still, one of the most common questions we get is “what new features would you like to see from Google maps”? In the hopes that someone out there at Google or in the online geography world is reading this, we’ve posted them.- Make the maps load faster. We work hard to make Nestoria as fast as possible. Unfortunately, the rendering of our results pages always waits on the rendering of the map. That’s a downer. We know what we’re asking is hard. If it were easy everyone would do it. This is far and away our most desired ‘feature’. We don’t care what sorts of caching black magic deals with the devil you have to make, do it.
- Make maps work in Facebook. Okay, technically this is as much a Facebook request as a Google request, but you’re all there in Silicon Valley. Work it out. Find a way. Let’s all get along and be friends. We want to add maps to the Nestoria Facebook apps.
- Integrate Google analytics into Google Maps. We’re data junkies and are big fans of Google Analytics as a way to validate our own bespoke metrics systems. It would be cool to have that type of reporting for maps as well. How are people using the map on our sites? Let us see, please.
Don’t get us wrong, we love all the zooming features, the overlays, the polygons that are continually being added. All great stuff. We love that parts of the map code are now opensourced. But these three features are the ones we want most.
One final note, we want to recognize that Google aren’t the only people innovating. Great stuff recently from the teams at Yahoo!, MSN, multimap, and OpenStreetMap, and we watch them all closely. Very cool that they’ve all risen to the challenge laid down by Google. Internet users everywhere are the better off for it. What’s your mapping wish list?
Join the 
Google Maps @ Night. The earth is a completely different landscape at night. While the images would not show more detail without light, it would show a different view of the planet that a lot of people may find attractive. Who doesn’t want to ahve a satellite image of their home city at night, it’s perty..