Lord Satri's Journal: Google Launches Collaborative Mapping and Shaded Terrain

Google's official Lat Lon Blog announced the addition of shaded terrain to their free Google Maps site. In addition to adding the Terrain button, they've removed the Hybrid button, combining it the Satellite one. A single look at it is enough to convince anyone this is very welcomed even if Yahoo! Maps, Microsoft's Virtual Earth and Ask.com Maps offered something similar for quite some time. Also released this week, Google Maps searches are now providing a thumbnail of the related street view photo, and arguably a major new feature, the My Maps feature somehow becomes Our Maps, allowing to collaborate directly on someone else's My Maps, this has a lot of potential of getting big, and last, you can more easily share KML and KMZ files and GeoRSS feeds through My Maps. From the Our Maps announcement: "Just click the "Collaborate" link and enter the email addresses of the people you want to invite. They'll receive an email invitation with a link to the map. Once they open the map, they should be able to edit it, as long as they are signed into a Google Account that's associated with that email address. You can also open your map to the world so anyone can edit it by selecting the "Allow anyone to edit this map" checkbox." Competition is not sleeping, Microsoft had a recent major release of Virtual Earth in addition to 33.7 Terabytes of new worldwide imagery.