My Maps –> Our Maps: Social Mapping from Google

The Google Lat/Long blog announced today that they have introduced collaborative map-making to the My Maps feature. They’re using a Surf Map to illustrate the new feature so, finally, Hawaii (my home state) is the center of the world!

Google LatLong: My Our Maps:

The My Maps feature of Google Maps lets people create maps to share their hobbies and expertise with the world. For example, a surfing enthusiast could map out their favorite surf spots or a surfing club could plot all the best beaches in Southern California. Now imagine if all the surfers around the globe worked together, leveraging their combined knowledge to create a single map of the best surf spots worldwide, applying the power of wiki-style collaboration to cartography.

Here’s a screenshot of the placemarker for the world-famous Banzai Pipeline on Oahu, satellite image of waves and all (click for larger image):

Jess Lee, the Google Maps Product Manager who posted the announcement, gives a little more detail about how the wiki works:

Starting today, Google Maps supports collaborative map-making, so multiple people can edit the same My Map. 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.

Here’s an update I just added to the map of the spot where I learned to surf:

Click on this link to see the placemarker on the live Surf Map.

Of course, what makes for a good break is usually the fact that no one else is on it, so the idea that “all the surfers around the globe” are going to work together to give away their best-kept secrets sounds pretty far-fetched to me. Or maybe just a little sad. Perhaps Google should have picked a different subject to be the champion of cartographic crowd-sourcing… Some things shouldn’t be shared with everyone on the planet.

Oh, Flickr… Bad move

Flickr updated their map feature this week and it is awful. You can read the official release here. People are screaming about it on the Flickr forums.

Here’s my .02: The old version of Flickr maps allowed you to zoom in to very specific places and see what things looked like on the ground from the perspective of many users. This map told stories—just take a look at the screenshot I posted below of how people were using the Flickr map to document the San Diego fires last month. During those fires, Flickr provided an amazing counterpoint to the Google Map that was being updated with evacuation notices and statistics, and the NASA photos that, amazing as they were, provided only a huge macro view of the disaster.

The new map destroys the storytelling aspect of geotagging. One of the comments in the forum noted that you can no longer *browse* the map but only *search* the map. I’d argue that you can’t even do that. If I try and search for photos of the San Diego fire, the results are pathetically limited, and they tell me nothing of the personal experiences of the people who live in these places. That’s why I look at photos on maps. To ground-truth the abstract satellite view and re-inscribe the human presence back into the map.

All of the people that I’ve interviewed so far echo these sentiments. Why do people geotag photos? To record their memories and put themselves onto the map. Why is the Geoweb being hailed as web 3.0? Because people want to discover *What is Here* rather than Where is X.

Flickr going to put themselves out of the geobusiness if they take this away from people.