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Google has announced the launch of a new service, My Maps, that will allow users to create their own Google Maps Mashups.
The newly offered MyMaps allows users to plot anything from Presidential Elections 2004 to Journey Trips around the World. Users can also attach Youtube videos to the maps. Microsoft has already been offering a similar service for a while now.
The new service has now pitched Google in direct competition with the eco system that it allowed to build on top of its Google Maps API. Numerous startups sprang up doing all sort of things from offering maps of Real Estate, Trulia to Live Bookmarking, Flagr. In fact this is exactly what one startup, Platial has been offering on top of Google Maps for quiet sometime. The service was doing quiet well and had even raised venture funding from Kleiner Perkins, Omidyar Network, Ram Shriram, Ron Conway and others.
The announcement shows us that Google is now taking social mapping and geo-tagging seriously and have come to realize that in the near future when digitally created content will explode, context will mean everything. MyMaps is a way to ask users to feed in context to locations and services, that could then be used by Google to show meaningful results. The announcement also tells us that you are always on shaky grounds, building on top of services and API´s provided by others. Recently Alexa, shut statsaholic down and decided to offer the same services itself, yesterday Mozilla decided to ship the social networking features itself that Flock was building for a while and today Google thought that they have got enough ideas from the startups that they should be doing all of this on their own.
If I were a founder I would have never built on top of others, and if I were an Investor I would have never invested in any startup doing this, after what I have come to see in a short amount of time.
Read: GigaOm and O’Reilly Radar
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