Google does Maps

Tried it out... the user interface is a lot more "bubbly" and happy looking than MapQuest's. I hope they will make some kind of desktop interface for quick searches.

North America is aaaaaall.... alooooone....

drifting by itself on a big, blue sea. But I'm in North America, so who cares!

Nice stuff, BTW.

But it is not compatibel with Safari

Works great under Firefox... watch out world, google is on a roll!

agreed. All they need now is a tv listing and maybe a better stock quotes thing. Then i can officially remove Yahoo from my bookmarks bar.

at macworld steve said there's a dashboard widget for maquest searching.

I still use Yahoo! for that stuff as well, but I imagine it won't be long until Google has the same. Desktop integration of those would be excellent.

I really like Google but some things about them make me wonder.

For instance, is every service they offer permanently in Beta status? Is it just for marketing hype? Granted, I know they like to adjust features and whatnot, but does that mean they have to slap that Beta tag on every logo? Is Gmail going to be always invite-only? Just last week, I got 50 more Gmail invites. FIFTY!!! How they hell am I going to use all those?!

I love the simplicty of Google's services, and they are generally very innovative an groundbreaking, hence they receive so much buzz when they release something. But who are their site designers? I've never been a fan of the rainbow Google logo itself, it always seemed very amateurish to me, but just look at these logos from their various sites:











There is no sense of style or continuity between these. Call me anal, but each service name has a different font, color and size relative to the Google logo. They don't even all seemed lined up exactly the same. The BETA tags on all these logos are all different too!

The respective sites, while awesome feature-wise, are so boring style-wise. I'm not saying Google needs to busy up their sites with pictures, more colors, and busy text, but there are some pretty innovative things they could do with CSS if they gave it just a little attention. Again, who are the site designers?

I don't want to rant on Google too much because they are an awesome company, but some of their sites just look like they were designed by high school students!

I am all for function over form. The appearance of Google's sites are amateurish looking but simple and they load quick. I'll take that over heavy graphics any day.

If you think the current logo is bad check out these earlier verions:

Those old logos are really bad. Ack. I remember the first one, which actually looks good next to the other ones. The other ones remind me that engineers are not designers.

I like Google's page designs, for the most part. I'll take spartan, fast-loading and functional every time.

As for the proliferation of betas: I remember when the Google search was in beta for what seemed like an eternity. They finally took it live when it was rock solid and proven. I really wouldn't mind if more companies (*cough* Apple *cough*) had nice, long public beta cycles to firm up their products before release, actually. It would save a lot of people the point-zero blues, and save a lot of engineers from a lot of late nights rushing out bugfix releases.

Google maps are great. They even make me forget about wanting Delorme to come back. I'm hoping a Mac developer will write an app that uses WebKit to download an store maps to your Powerbook. Maybe even throw in GPS.

i just discovered google maps last week... wow, wow, WOW. takes mapquest out back and beats it to death. i had just heard on npr a couple weeks ago how microsoft was trying to do a similar thing, before i even knew about google maps. wouldn't you know, it wasn't microsoft having a good idea, they just saw someone doing somethign popular and figure "hey, we have a ridiculous amount of cash... let's do what they're doing because we CAN!"

Google Maps Dashboard Widget please? How long will that take?

Sucks that it doesn't work for Safari yet, that implies Dashboard Widget would be similarly incompatible, for the time being.

Yup, Dashboard widget would be cool!

i second the request for a Dashboard midget

hell, why not? I third it.

Of course it would be even better if it worked offline but i doubt Google would allow that

wow, i've been wrong all along! america really IS the only country in the world!

He has finally seen the light!!! Congradulations

P.S.

I am an American and DAMN proud of it!

America floating alone in a sea of blue...yup.

That summarizes our foreign policy just nicely.

About the only way we'll be able to pay off our debt: sink everyone else

May I politely remind everyone this is an International forum!!! :-)

What about my post indicated that I thought you were either a "fellow American" or that I thought that only Americans were reading?

Sensitive much?

Check this link if you'd like to use Google Maps from your Address Book.

i was only kidding with my commnet (the light part, not about being an american)