14 DAY TRIAL // It's all about optimizing the experience people have when they're visiting your site, so that they will come again. No more, and by any means no less and who can do that better than the users themselves?
Brian Cornell, Software Engineer at Google Maps has announced the maps aficionados about the latest tweak they have brought to the interface, in a post on the Google Lat Long Blog. The update is easily describable: anyone can now edit the order of the features displayed in the panel: "we're happy to let you know that now you can drag and drop items in the left panel to reorder them. If you have a large map, you can also move features to the previous or next page by dragging them to the special targets that appear before and after the list of features. After you're finished rearranging everything, just click save."
A handy feature to be provided with, I'll tell you that! It's getting really tiresome sometimes to hover your mouse over every item in the panel to know what it does and if you don't have a good visual memory, chances are you'll be doing that all over again pretty soon. By arranging the respective items in the order of importance or by how much you use them, asides from being a timesaver, one of the best optimization methods there is. I haven't got around to test it yet but I wonder whether you'll be able to discard those you know you'll never use.
A couple of days ago Marissa Meyer said in a DLD conference that so far there have been 1000 lifetimes spent creating and viewing maps and using Google Earth. If you're to break down the number, you'll have about 65,000 years spend doing so, or 5.256 minutes of working with the service for each and everyone on the planet. In terms of success, I think they hit big with it.