Essential Resources for Google Maps

Top 10 Google Maps implementations:

CheapGas
“Getting best prices in your city. It is comprised of 170 gas price
information web sites that help consumers find low gasoline prices.
Powered by GasBuddy.”

Geobloggers
“geobloggers is a site that’s built upon two great technologys.
Google Maps takes care of the mapping side and Flickr takes care of the
image hosting, scaling, and so on. geobloggers mushes those two
together.”

Gmaps Pedometer
“This is a little hack that uses Google’s superb mapping
application to help record distances traveled during a running or
walking workout.”

Google-Yahoo Traffic-Weather Map
Combined with Yahoo Traffic Feed with Google Map to show traffic condition.

Weather Bonk
“Weather maps lets you view real time weather information on a
google map. This can provide some very interesting information,
particularly in areas with microclimates, such as San Francisco. For
example, summer in San Francisco can be particularly cold and foggy,
and this map can help you to find a sunnier area of the city to visit.
Clicking on the web cams give you a visual observation from a given
location. Looking at wind direction can help you locate approaching
weather fronts.”

Global Coordinate
“The idea behind globalcoordinate.com is to take a number of common
but different web applications and put them together. You will find
here an atlas, weblogs, photo-blogs, travel guides, weather reports,
news sources, etc. The objective is to let users find the synergies
between these concepts.”

Cell Phone Reception and Tower Search
“Consumers can search for the best carrier in their area. And with
our graphical tower location search, users can pinpoint nearby tower
locations. Even to the exact rooftop with satellite imagery and the
help of Google Maps!”

Housing Maps
Powered by Craigslist. This Google Maps visualize where to buy houses, rent rooms around US

Tagzania
“Tagzania is about tags and places. If you register and log in, you
can add places, points, to create and document your maps. When you add
a point, you may tag it with keywords. That way, Tagzania is not only a
place to build and keep your own maps, shared territories are created
as well.”

Gchart
Quick way to find out what time is it around the world.

Worth to mention:

ChicagoCrime
“This is a non-profit, freely browsable database of crimes reported
in Chicago. It is not affiliated with the Chicago Police Department or
with Google Maps. It is not an official source of crime information for
the city of Chicago. Rather, it is an alternative view of public record
that is available elsewhere. At any given point, this site contains
crime-report information spanning a 90-day period. After 90 days, the
crime data is removed.”

gWiFi: Using GoogleMaps to find free WiFi
“This website is an attempt to make it easier for the
road-warrior’s, students, free loaders etc to find locations that offer
free wireless internet access in the New York City area by showing all
free wireless nodes on a Map of New York.”

Track visitors to your website using Google Maps
“Lets you track the visitors to your website using Google Maps.”

Earthquakes in the last week
“Earthquakes of magnitude 2.5 or greater in the last 7 days. Click
on the menu bar to choose a new map view or create your own view by
clicking to re-center the map and then zooming in to get a closer look.
Click ‘link to this page’ and then bookmark the new url so you can
return to your new custom view.”

Whereis
“Geolocate where the server is on Google Maps from an URL.”

ZippyWeather
“Live Australian Weather.”

Road Sign Math
“How many road signs are there that have mathematical significance.
I’ve looked at many, and there are very few. Road Sign Math is the game
of finding road signs that have math in them.”

toEat.com: Where do you want to eat?
“toEat.com aims to be the central point for hungry people and
restaurants to congregate. Our first release is the restaurant browser
system, which is only a small piece of what is on the toEat.com
roadmap.”

beenmapped.com
” Never forget the location of that awesome place again. Bookmark it on BeenMapped.com!”

HotMaps
“HotorNot + Google Maps = Finding Hot People (Male or Female) by Zip Code”

Tools:

gMap it!
“gMap it is a mozilla Firefox extension that allows you to find
directions from google maps based on publicly listed phone numbers.”

Mobile GMaps – Google Maps on J2ME mobile phones
“Mobile GMaps is a free piece of software that displays Google Maps
and MSN Virtual Earth maps and satellite imagery on Java J2ME-enabled
mobile phones or other devices.”

MapBuilder
“MapBuilder lets you build your own map with number of location and
generate GoogleMap source code for this map. So you will be able to
paste it directly into your web page and use it with your API key
requested at Google http://www.google.com/apis/maps/signup.html. After
creating your own map you will be able to save all locations with
related information for future use. It means that you’ll be able to
make some improvements for your map later.”

HOW-TO: Make your own annotated multimedia Google map
“This how-to will show you how to make your own annotated Google
map from your own GPS data. Plus, you’ll be able to tie in images and
video to create an interactive multimedia map. We’ll walk you through
the steps we took to generate an annotated map of a walk we took
recently through our hometown, now that it’s actually starting to get
warm enough to want to walk about!”

Hacking Maps with the Google Maps API
Great guide on Google Maps API and how to make your own map implementation

MapKi
“This is meant to be a forum for sharing ideas, implementations,
and help for the Google Maps API
(http://www.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/). Any user can add to
or edit any of the pages on the site, just like any wiki site.”

Google Maps on your Website
A how-to guide on putting a interactive map on your site

Integrating Google Maps into Your Web Applications
Tutorial on how to integrate Google Maps.

Resources:

Google Maps Mania
“An unofficial Google Maps blog tracking the websites, ideas and tools being influenced by Google Maps.”

Google Maps on Wikipedia
Good set of information on Google Maps by Wikipedia

Google Maps Group

Google Sightseeing
A blog introduces some interesting place to look at by using Google Maps’ screenshots