http://maps.google.com/maps

It's extremely cool.

Nice... but where is the rest of the world?

It looks like it'll be useful, when it actually covers the UK. :p

Elsewhere.

South American no longer exists, it seems.

That is awesome. I love how you can pan smoothly, and can zoom in and out so easily.

pimpalicous:D

Psh. who needs em

Useless.

Very, very cool. Much easier to use than mapquest, with a better looking interface.

I'm sure they'll be expanding their maps to include other countries soon, but seeing as how it is just a beta, they have an excuse.

Yay found my street

Just went to toronto and moved east, found my city, zoomed in and yay.

Is anyone else starting to feel like google may be about to take over the world?

YES.

Finally a map that realizes the numbers on my street are BACKWARDS.


In other words, my house should be at the other end of the street. But some genius put the numbers going the wrong way.

Why are the direction arrows labelled up, down, left and right though? Surley North, South, East and west would be more appropriate for a map.

this prooves what many of us feared, americans arent aware of any lands other than theirs.

So who on earth keeps kicking their butts in football* then? Canadians?


(*real football, ie, soccer to ya yanks)

if(getThingFlags(source) & 0x8){
  do her}
elseif(getThingFlags(source) & 0x4){
  do other babe}
else{
  do a dude}

I don't know, but I like this better than Mapquest. :p

However, it is kind of frightening. Where will all of this expansion end?

It looks like Europe is still all yours, Queen Maeve.

Wow, no need to waste money on atlases anymore...

It even got some very recent street additions in my area. Impressive.

Google maps is cool. If you have java also check out http://www.map24.com/

Yes, and I'd love it to do exactly that. This sort of benevolent monopoly will make finding information so much easier. Google already has a near-total monopoly on search engine. There really isn't any point in there being any other search engines, because Google does it so excellently. Similarly with image searching, and internet cacheing.
I imagine Gmail would be taking a fair chunk out of the hotmail users, but it probably won't achieve a significant monopoly over ISP mail services.
But this map service looks set to dominate over all others, when it's done. Google dominates because it does things very very well, and if all internet services are done by Google then we'll have all those services done very very well, and all interlinked and working together flawlessly, as opposed a dozen different opposing services.

You honestly are okay with a monopoly? In the end it's only worse for the consumer, benevolent or not.

And how much to we pay for this again?

Google search engine has been a huge monopoly for the last few years, with pretty much no serious competitors. Askjeeves, Yahoo, MSN search, these have all been rendered useless. Because Google does it so much better than everyone else. It has an incredibly simple page layout, it is very fast, and it does exactly what you want it to do. It's a monopoly because it's excellent. It has been a monopoly for some time, and it continues to be excellent.
Yes, your point probably stands true for other businesses, specifically those selling products, but those selling services are different, especially on the internet. A google monopoly works.

Not if it's free. Then it's all the same, really.

Obi--wtf?

They better start a kickarse free webhosting service soon.

[Edit: I found my college in 5 seconds. My house even quicker.]

Shocking, soon google will have the best of everything - games, hosting, lesbians, whatever. I'm sure google will grow even further, I reckon this must be a "success" so it won't stop here.

Cool, found some of my friends' houses.

The difference between a Google monopoly and a Microsoft monopoly is that MS did it illegally (and has been convicted of illegal business practices in a court of law).

Even still, if other search engines were to close down and leave google as the only remaining one, that would be a Bad Thing.

Google has a lot of competition on many fronts:

mail - hotmail, yahoo mail, you name it
maps - mapquest, map24, mapblast, etc.
search - teoma, msn, yahoo, etc.
ads - many companies like crappy doubleclick, ugo, overture, burstnet, etc.

I'm certainly not any MS lover but I think that's a bit oversimplifying...