Google was on a roll yesterday with new product releases. Google Sky took the limelight, but there was another little change that seemed somewhat inconsequential, but has far-reaching implications for the wider use of Google Maps in applications all over the web. If you go to Google Maps and enter any address, you will see the following in the upper right corner of the map…
Clicking on the “Link to this page” link brings up a dialog box with two boxes of information. The first is a direct link to the map. The second is a bit of HTML which will let you embed the map into various web pages.
Prior to this little innovation, users could either link directly to the Google Maps page, or they could go through the process of getting a Google Maps API, setting up the javascript code, then hoping that it all worked in their particular map. Embedding maps into Blogger and other hosted sites was difficult, at best. With this new application, it’s a snap. For example, if I wanted to show the location of the restaurant where I had dinner last night, it’s not problem. I find it in maps and use this new embed feature.
The only problem is that sometimes the iframe HTML tag isn’t interpreted correctly within the WordPress framework. Other than that, it’s a snap.