A week has passed since the South African Google Maps launch, time enough to settle the thoughts and put some fingers to keys. I’d have to admit that the launch was less than stellar, but perhaps I’m getting used to high-flying events like NetProphet, Silicon Cape and Internetix – and quite probably this wasn’t trying to be one of those. Maybe deliberately, the venue almost required one to have used mapping to find it, and many of those I spoke to had already sampled the new engine just to be told how to have used it. Finally, as a long-time user of GPS, and a veteran of Google’s mapping engine many years back in Europe, the directions being produced on this new co.za domain and displayed with fanfare, didn’t really rock my paradigm of what mapping should be. The Engineer-Heart in me finds this tragic given the amount of effort I know would have gone into bringing a new country online. Sign of the times…

That said, the underlying technology is doing an excellent job. Nay. A Very Excellent Job.

New (at least with this ease) was the ability to drag your navigation route to insert any number of waypoints – producing an instant recalculation of directions, turn-by-turn instructions and time/distance figures. Try it here. Oh. And perhaps alter the destination completely. No sweat. Processing. Done. Not only fantastic from a usability point-of-view, but demonstrating some pretty incredible behaviour ‘under-the-hood’.

A key-point during the presentation was the assertion that almost 70% of all searches return a geographical component – either an address or a proximity to an address – naturally prompting the thought that searches ought to natively focus on the location of results. To this end, Google’s Point-of-Interest (POI) search is clearly very powerful, and certainly one of the sharper arrows in their quiver: By locating businesses (via a layer) on their maps, they can aggregate everything known about these entities – their cloud-knowledge consisting of reviews, photos, recommendations etc – and present them all as a “more info” page. Not a big deal for Corporates perhaps, but a tremendous opportunity for vendors in hospitality, travel, activity and interest sectors, especially given the huge online research which now takes place before one travels. And not only will this cloud-knowledge grow with time, but this new potential for discovery provides a beautiful incentive for people to start adding their businesses to this layer, spending all their precious time making sure the salient information – operating hours, costs, services etc – is properly input to guarantee the correct display. Definitely in the businesses’ best interest. Yes. Indeed. If your business is not on the map, be sure to pop on over to the Local Business Center to increase your chance of winning. Presumably you’ve already registered to still be reading?

OK, so a few more comments. Considering the focus of the event was – as I understood – a more technical presentation, I felt that it could have capitalised far better on various methods of interacting/integrating with the mapping engine – via the API for example. Furthermore, very little spin was placed on the Android 2.0 incarnation which has caused more than a few GPS-vendors’ shares to “retreat” with its cloud-connected, turn-by-turn voice navigation. Click here for awkward-but-impressive video. Reading between the lines, it’s fairly apparent where Android is headed – premium access to the wealth of features Google sprouts from its Labs.

It’s also fairly obvious that layers are a big part of the Maps story. Already Transit layers exist, showing connections and promising timetables.  Photo layers, Real-Estate layers, personalised “My Layers” and all manner of anecdotal mash-ups – all kindly supplied by you: The greater Google Employee.

So. My take-home at the end of the presentation was simply a “wow-gosh”. Not really about the barn-like venue, draped with sheets and lit with the 4 bright colours of world domination. Not really about the maps. Not even about their fancy javascript and mind-boggling aggregation algorithms. Simply a recognition that in this age of Crowdsourcing, Google are still miles ahead of anyone else in terms of incentivising people to share their time and effort. And I’m not just talking about registering businesses. I’m thinking about the effort we go through

• making sure our blogs index correctly – Google has more access to information and opinion
• doing the grunt work of facial classification in Picasa – how long until they’ve got a face/person search?
• defining the conversion goals of all your sites – allowing further site-rankings on success?
• populating their planet with 3D buildings – courtesy of SketchUp
• fixing the cartography for fun – Map Maker to the rescue
• providing a gazillion mails and documents a day to advertise against – all for the merry price of nil

The list is long. The incentives are spot-on. The enabling technology is spot-on. So just how many other industries will be beaten into submission because Google is spot-on?