With Monday’s unveiling of Google’s Map Maker, Google account holders now have the ability to edit and add to certain Google Maps. The Map Maker currently only allows for map editing in a select group of countries including Cyprus, Iceland, Pakistan, Vietnam and the Caribbean nations. Functions of the tool include custom map creations, borders and regions, places of interest and road networks.

ESRI released their downloadable application, ArcGIS Explorer 480, this week. The upgraded version still offers the same basic function of geoprocessing services, but with major improvements such as KML improvements and increase in performance.

Nokia acquired Plazes, an LBS social mapping network. Plazes provides updates of friends’ activities in a find me/follow me type of service. The social mapping application will take Nokia one step closer to “bringing people and places together” and also acknowledges the rise and demand of LBS.

Microsoft and Virtual Earth launched a program that allows state and local governments to share their imagery, called GoVE. All of the imagery from these governments, municipalities and aerial photographers gets sent to Microsoft, which in turn is published by Virtual Earth.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Data Transfer Solutions (DTS) developed an application for the Texas Forest service called the Texas Wildfire Data Browser. The application provides viewing for wildfire threats, fuel hazards and fire locations.

In light of the Iowa flooding, MSNBC posted an interactive map allowing users to track flooding locations in the Midwest. The majority of the points on the map give the levels of historical rivers and the others even link to specified news areas.

Google Earth’s text gets a make-over with a new option to view KML texts on the map. Designed by Sergey Devytakov, the new tool, called Labels, allows the specification of font changes, shadows and outlines and choice of icon, etc.

Maps and texts combine through Kvisu.com. This unique search engine takes text based results and aligns them with a surface map using visualized keywords.

Zimbabwe gets on the map. Google Maps has been used to track the political campaign of Morgan Tsvangirai and the unfortunate terror occurring in the country.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Frank at the Google Earth Blog just leaked that Google will be announcing an API for Google Earth that will run in a browser. The short of it is you will be able to get GE’s 3D rendering capabilities and KML support to run in a browser. The first release will be just Windows, but will support IE, Firefox and other Mozilla flavors.

This looks to be a direct shot at Microsoft’s 3D Virtual Earth that also runs in the browser. The question mark in my mind will be if the Google Earth version has the same performance issues as MSVE. It is also interesting that Google released an API instead of a new version of GE that ran in a browser. Will this be a case of Google testing the waters with the API then releasing a product?

From a personal perspective I’ll be very interested to see how the new Google Earth API handles KML. Frank says the new API will be a, “subset of the Google Earth 3D graphics rendering engine and interfaces with KML support”. The question is will that KML support be robust like Google Earth allowing thousands of geometries to be drawn or less robust like Google Maps where you are limited to the low hundreds. I’m sure we’ll see soon enough, but congrats to Google on porting the technology to a browser, surely not an easy task. Although it begs one last question - does this herald the end of thick client geobrowsers?

Popularity: 19% [?]