14 DAY TRIAL // Google allowed its users to edit the maps before, by moving markers of their homes and businesses, but nothing of this magnitude has ever impacted the online community like the latest option added. It's heavenly manna for those in the need for pinpoint accuracy and, to be honest, a big help to the engineers that constantly had to manually operate the adjustments as they happened.
It's final, Google Maps is open for heavy user editing. Because, as the Google Lat Long Blog writes, nobody knows a neighborhood like its inhabitants, they have been given free access to all of the editing tools: businesses, opening up or closing down, monuments missed by the Google teams, even the smallest boutique can now be added to the map, as long as it's not a prank.
And pranks will come, but rest assured, Google will not just stand and watch as the Maps they're so proud of, over at the Googleplex, are tarnished and made completely unusable by wrongdoers. Even after modifying one location, the original listing information set for it will still show, along with the history of changes made.
The biggest of all those described above is the option to add new places. It only takes a few seconds from hitting the Send button until the information is searchable by others, due to the lack of verification.
Now, the one thing left to be seen is whether this level of freedom given to users will be followed up by the other two Internet giants, Yahoo! and Microsoft, each having their own versions of the Maps. Yahoo! is all about opening up these days, so it's not a far stretch to believe it will follow in Google's footsteps, but Microsoft is a total different story. When it updates its maps, the company does it by the 2x Terabytes packages added every month, and it's not likely that the data packed in them is all that open to modifications just to start with. But, as an old wise saying goes, "you live and you learn." I might learn that I was wrong about MS. Then again, another saying, "you crash and you burn," might describe the future of those not eager to embrace and trust their users to be valid mapmakers.