Wednesday, June 29, 2005

Google Earth

Last week I posted about the extension of the satellite coverage in Google Maps. Well it now appears that with the launch of Google Earth they're well on the way to integrating other technologies they acquired when they bought Keyhole last year into their main stream product, and in the process beating Microsoft to market yet again.

The Register and Slashdot have more coverage, and it looks like the new services will be integrated into Google Sightseeing real soon now, but for a real in-depth look at the new offering Inside Google has the best analysis I've seen so far...

Of course on the down side is that the new Google Earth service is, like a lot of Google's new toys, only available for Microsoft Windows. For a web services company they sure don't seem to understand the problems with vendor lock-in very well. Perhaps their new company motto should be, "Google, only slightly evil".

Update: For those of us interesting in adding data to Google Earth, there is now some documentation and a tutorial about the KML file format it uses to help us do it...

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