If you look close, you will notice that there are 3D wireframes of buildings now available on Google Maps for some locations.  You still cannot rotate or tilt the view, but it's looking more like Google Earth all the time.  True, Microsoft already has a "Google Earth" for the browser, but it requires Internet Explorer and the performance is sub par — bordering on unusable.

The changes Google makes to products always seem to have performance in mind — the new 3D buildings do not seem to add any additional overhead.  I am hoping one day all the features we find in Google Earth will be available in Google Maps — and the way it looks, they are moving in that direction.

It's still questionable if grandma would do it, but I am thinking she could without much help.  The new map creator for Google Maps makes it dead simple to create basic mashups that point out places, routes or areas using markers lines, and boxes.  This tool can be used to create mashups for visualizing anything from election results to your summer vacation.

Create and share personalized, annotated maps of your world. Learn more.

• Mark your favorite places on your map.
• Draw lines and shapes to highlight paths and areas.
• Add your own text, photos, and videos.
• Publish your map to the web.
• Share your map with friends and family.

After a very public expression of disbelief over the weekend, Google has finally made available the imagery people were upset to see disappear.  Google was accused of "rewriting history" to remove the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, and several people even thought this was brought about through a conspiracy between the local government of New Orleans and Google.

Several months ago, Google "updated" the imagery in New Orleans — and because of this, these recent comments have been a bit surprising to them.  The heated discussion around the old imagery pressured the search giant into putting some more recent imagery back up.  Maybe there was no conspiracy after all?

Yelp could very well be the source of a new breed of Google bombs — like the one seen on Google Maps when searching for "Microsoft".  How is this possible?  Well, "Sara B" decided to upload an anti-Windows image along with her review of the company — it so happens she reviewed the #1 ranking result on Google Maps for the term "Microsoft".  This is a problem because images from Yelp appear in the organic search results on Google Maps.

Intentional or not, this could be a serious problem just waiting to happen.  From what I can tell, nothing can prevent people from uploading any image for any company they want.  I'm not certain how easy this is to actually exploit, or how long the image would last if someone was successful — users can easily report inappropriate photos through the Google Maps interface. 

Today the Google Maps team announced some important additions to the Google Maps product and its API.  According to Nigel Tao, the current version of Google Maps now supports GeoRSS (Simple, GML and W3C Geo) formats — to import a GeoRSS file, simply "search" for the URL of one.  Give this link a shot.

An even bigger annoucement, that developers who create mashups will probably be very happy about, is support for both GeoRSS and KML directly through the API with very little code.  For example, to share some photos as a Google Maps mashup, you can create a ximple KML file and easily consume it with the API:

var gx = new GGeoXml("http://kml.lover.googlepages.com/my-vacation-photos.kml");map.addOverlay(gx); 

A brand new feature on Google Maps lets you see a visual representations of traffic in some major US cities.  Green is ideal traffic conditions, yellow means there may be some delays, and red means you should probably expect stop and go traffic.

Imagine this feature available in a GPS navigation unit with wifi or 3G connectivity in your vehicle — that would be cool. 

Just a few moments ago, the Google Maps API Terms of Use was updated to impose some restrictions on the service.  One of the newer features allows developers to retrieve latitude and longitude coordinates by simply specifying an address — this is often an essential service for any mashup looking to plot locations of buildings or houses.

1.6 Geocode Requests. There is a limit of 50,000 geocode requests per day per Maps API key. This translates to roughly one geocode request every 1.73 seconds. If you exceed this 24-hour limit, the Maps API geocoder may stop working for you temporarily. If you continue to abuse this limit, your access to the Maps API geocoder may be blocked permanently.

With the new restriction, users with popular mashups that rely on this feature could start experiencing outages — and they may even get blocked without purposely abusing the system.

How many people will this actually affect?  I don't know, but it would be interesting to hear from you if you think this could be a problem.  With all this API stuff happening lately, maybe Google's next move will be to disable the maps API altogether (yes, this is sarcasm, but who saw the Search API discontinuation coming?)

Update:

A Google spokesperson tells us the geocoder limitation is not new — it has been there since the service launched.  The change in the API Terms of Use was made to simply clarify the limitation.

"The geocoder limit is actually not new. Ever since we launched the geocoder in June 2006, we've restricted access to 50,000 requests per day while we evaluate the performance of the service."

Gaia was an open source 3D earth viewer — in their own words: "an attempt to reverse engineer famous Google Earth and implement its functionality in open, portable, customizable and extendable way."  Last week, it was featured on the Google Operating System blog, no doubt what tipped off Google to its existence.

The Gaia project was delivered a C & D order from Michael Jones, Chief Technologist of Google Earth, Maps, and Local Search.  The original letter was polite, and did a pretty good job explaining the project violates the Google Earth TOS.

"I am not an attorney. I am not posturing. Just the opposite. We on the engineering team are hopeful that despite the risk your actions (break the ToS, reverse engineer parts of the data protection mechanisms, publish the fact and code, encourage others) pose to our product, team, company, and users, we remain hopeful that this was an unintended result of what started as intellectual curiosity by a smart engineer like ourselves who has a passion to learn how things work." — Michael Jones

The Gaia team has complied with the request without resistance, and posted this response on their website:

"25 November 2006, we've got the letter from Michael Jones, the Chief Technologist of Google Earth, Google Maps, and Google Local search, requesting us to cease reverse engineering and improper usage of licensed data that Google Earth use. We understand and respect Google's position on the case, so we've removed all downloads from this page and we ask everybody who have ever downloaded gaia 0.1.0 and prior versions to delete all files concerned with the project, which include source code, binary files and image cache (~/.gaia)."

Google finished rolling out their click-to-call functionality on Google Maps today, but after reading an article on Valleywag about how to prank call other people with the service, I got thinking about how else the service could be abused.  Although it's almost certainly against the terms and conditions, the new feature could theoretically allow users to make free long distance phone calls to any North American number.

Since every business listing on Google Maps has the "click-to-call" feature enabled, the only thing you need to do is get listed.  Now instead of dialing a long distance phone number on your phone, you "dial" it through your own business listing on Google Maps.

What can Google do to prevent this from happening?  Honestly, I don't think there is a solution unless Google starts charging businesses to have the "click-to-call" feature enabled.  But with Microsoft Live Local providing the same feature at no cost, there isn't much chance that will happen any time soon.

Google is about to announce their "Click-to-call" functionality on Google Maps for the United States.  Justin Uberti, Googler in Kirkland Washington, slips out some juicy details with a screenshot that some people might already be seeing.  He says the rollout is not 100% complete, so we should be looking for more updates to happen tomorrow.

Windows Live Local has had this feature for months now, but I find it a bit useless living in Canada — for Americans though, I can see how this would be very useful.  Ordering pizza is as easy as searching for "pizza" and clicking "Connect for free" — hopefully in version two they will pay for the food too.