Fubra

The birth of a map revolution

This blog post was written on Friday 8th July 2005 by paul who has been working for Fubra as a Director and Co-Founder for 12 years. Our staff are encouraged to blog on this site, but the views expressed are individual and do not necessarily represent those of Fubra.

Since Google launched their maps website at the beginning of this year, developers all over the world have been “hacking” together their own interpretation of the map system, plotting everything from chicago crime scenes to farnborough hotels on top of the google map interface. At the time there was a bit of mystery as to how google would react to hundreds of third parties using their system for free.

However, as of the end of June, Google announced a Google Maps API, which effectively means that they are officially endorsing the use of their maps by third parties.

Strategically, this is an utterly brilliant move by Google. By embracing the developer community, and making their map system both free and extremely easy to implement into other sites, they will soon be the most widely used map service on the web. They will go from not having a map service, to become the world’s leading online map service in less than a year. If that isn’t a smart move, I don’t know what is!

Tags: Google, Maps

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