Google Maps Finally Gets a 'Lab' for Zany Experiments

Google products wear their beta tag with pride. Gmail was in beta for five years before, reluctantly, shedding the label to the disapproval of nostalgic users. The company always updates its products too and runs maybe hundreds of live tests at any given time. Even so, it still had the need for a dedicated testing section where the most 'dangerous' or quirky experiments could be safely housed so it created Labs. Over time it expanded the program to various products and one of its oldest, Google Maps, finally gets a lab of its own.

There's no word from Google yet, but anyone visiting Google Maps will see the small labs icon in the upper-right corner. There are nine experiments available for now, some quite useful, some fun and some, well, for example with Rotatble Maps you can flip the world upside down, the South is North and the other way around, if you're tired of looking at the same plain old boring Earth you've seen thousands of times already.

One of the best experiments is Drag 'n' Zoom. This little tool is great, the kind of thing you ask yourself how you've lived without it. It simplifies zooming a great deal by enabling you to select the exact area you want to see. No more 'click zoom button', 'pan', 'click zoom button again', 'pan some more' madness that has been plaguing Maps from the early days.

Aerial Imagery adds aerial imagery to the map to give you a better perspective rather than the strict, top-down satellite imagery. There aren't that many places which have aerial imagery yet, but Google says it's working on adding more in the future. Until now, the aerial imagery was only available to developers through the Google Maps API. Other experiments include LatLng Tooltip, which pops up latitude and longitude info when you hover the mouse over a location, LatLng Marker, which enables you to place a marker on the map indicating the latitude and longitude of that point, and a Back to Beta tool, just like in Gmail Labs, for the nostalgic users mentioned above.