Written By Kate Zimmermann | April 5, 2007 | Share This |

Google’s newest mapping tool, My Maps, lets users create their own maps with a seamless drag-and-drop interface. Maps can contain placemarks, lines, or blocked areas, and can be customized with descriptive texts, embedded links, photos, and videos. Users can share maps by creating a unique hyperlink, make them public or unlisted, and can open maps in Google Earth.

What My Maps doesn’t have is a searchable database of everyone’s public maps. I tried searching Google and Google Maps for some of the map samples created by Google employees, but came up with nothing. There’s also no way to mark off distances - as I was creating my River to River Running Map for NYC, that was pretty frustrating.

Overall, however, this is a slick tool - and reminds me of some parting advice offered by Safa Rashtchy in his last Silk Road report:

“Many web applications and services are still too complicated for the average users…It’s easy for many companies to forget that most Americans are not web-savvy. The 50 million baby boomer generation is the largest single group online and they did not grow up with computers, let alone the Internet.”

The companies that can resolve this issue with simpler website design, he says, “will experience much higher growth rates and excess benefits.” My Maps does a really good job of creating a simple user interface that fluidly integrates with Google’s other services . GigaOM calls this the “yahooification of Google“, but I disagree - the sensibility of My Maps comes from something uniquely Google.

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