Apparently it’s not enough to be the platform for maps mashups. Now Google wants in on the action.
Simple map-making is now built into their local search interface. My initial reaction, like with Google Base (the classifieds-and-more tool), is that Google should stay out of content creation, even if it’s user-generated. They’re really good at searching other people’s content, so why not stick to that? If Microsoft had kept it to Operating Systems, they might have made them better.
Focus is tough, no matter who you are. I’m not very good at it, and yet it’s my favorite chapter in the Immutable Laws.
One could easily argue that content-creation is right in line with organizing the world’s information, which is Google’s lofty goal. If something is in my head, it isn’t search-able by The Goog (yet!). So, they provide everyone a way to get that information out. There’s already plenty of stuff on the web and more is being added every day. I’d like to see them focus on organizing that.
I’m hoping for a post on Portland-based Platial’s blog. They do a lot of the same stuff as My Maps. They did comment here (seventh from the top):
We actually knew last week that this was coming–we were never naive enough to think Google wouldn’t identify some part of the giant mash-up space for themselves.
We’ve gone beyond mash-up into a space where real differentiation now takes place among mapping offerings. Google has disrupted our businesses this morning BUT haven’t touched what we consider to be our main use case, target or any of that…yet.
Dan Gilmour says Platial is better for a couple reasons. Those sorts of differentiation will become especially important for businesses built off of another’s API. In the end, this will probably not change much. That tends to be how the Google products go, but it can’t help but rock the boat when the 150 billion dollar gorilla makes an announcement like this.
Update: Platial has update their blog with some good thoughts.
One might argue that they were hosting, supporting, and otherwise encouraging user content as soon as they started caching web pages and other online documents and making the easily accessible. Essentially, they used to just copy stuff and then make it searchable. Enabling users to create it and keep it solely on their servers just simplifies the process. 🙂 Now they can control the format and do not need to worry about crawling, copying, copyright, caching, or competitors (as much). I’d say they’re trading one simplicity for another. 🙂
Ha! I like the 5 Cs, Bubna.
Making information available is a noble goal, but I think they need to stick to being brokers.
See Paul Kedrosky’s Is Google Doing a Microsoft?