Google Earth and Maps Combined…

One of the most fulfilling moments in a person's life is when he is able to look back and say "I did that" with the pride of the inventor or of the person who came through it all, despite the many difficulties he/she had to endure. The holidays' time is the best to do that because that's when you get to have the peace and quiet that otherwise would be so difficult to obtain in the middle of running errands for others, or while you have a deadline pressing hard against your schedule.

The Google Earth and Google Maps team have taken the time to marvel of their achievements (that would be their work and their blog) and decided to give us a short summary regarding those of the year that almost passed (psst! I guess that means that there'll be no more releases or updates until New Year's!).

The thing they pride the most about is introducing Street View and constantly updating it with new cities every couple of weeks or months, but that originally happened in May, so it's a bit old. Nevertheless, the blog post introducing the service is still one of the top five most read posts and has been that throughout the year.

Second came the Google Earth Outreach program that they launched with the non-profits as their main target and the post pointing to it contained a video featuring an appearance by Jane Goodall that has been viewed over 22 thousand times. That's not bad considering that the blog only had 8838 subscribers at the time I wrote this.

The most impressive, they say, was the Disaster Relief Maps that came to the My Maps tab, previously introduced. From flood maps created by "citizen journalists" and BBC Berkshire to the San Diego fire maps and Google Earth layer of Southern California that pointed to so many new ways to help.

Adding YouTube videos in Google Earth in a special layer was also something they prided themselves in doing because by it they just added a new dimension to traditional maps, one that hasn't been seen before.

The year has been a busy one, but the people at the Google Earth and Google Maps think and feel that there's room for more. They're just keeping it for next year.