Google Maps Gets Bird’s Eye View Option for Maps!

Maps Logo

A few months ago, Google launched 45° imagery for select cities through its Google Maps API. In February, Google launched this new way to browse maps as an experimental feature in Google Maps Labs and starting today, this bird’s eye view imagery will be available for all users by default. These high-resulution images – which are currently only available in a select number of cities in the U.S. and South Africa – will automatically appear once users zoom in to an area while in satellite mode.

For Bing, a similar bird’s eye view feature has long been one of the differentiating features of Microsoft’s mapping product. For the time being, Bing’s bird’s eye view is available in more places, but otherwise, the feature sets of Google’s and Microsoft’s products are very similar. Just like Bing Map, Google also allows users to rotate images and see a location from different angles, for example.

Overall, this is nice update to Google maps, as it allows users to zoom in closer and see buildings and other locations with more detail. As Google’s Randy Wilson – a member of Google’s Imagery Team – notes, “even when looking at familiar areas, seeing driving directions overlaid on 45° imagery will give you a whole new understanding of the neighborhood.”

Google Maps 45° option

Knowing Google and how they like to get things done quickly, we can only expect them to start this new option to more places. Lets just hope they get this pushed out to everywhere sooner rather than later!

It seems that Google Maps has also added shortened URLs to the map links on the site!

Sending someone a Google Maps URL can be a pain, because they tend to be very long. To remedy this, Google has integrated their previously mentioned goo.gl URL shortening service into Google Maps, so you can shorten links right from the map.

The feature is still in Google Labs, so you’ll need to turn it on by clicking the green flask in the top right corner of the Maps page and enabling the “Short URL” feature. After refreshing the page, clicking on the “link” button will no longer give you a mile-long URL, but a concise link that you can paste into Twitter or send in an email. It does disable the embedding feature, but if you don’t tend to use that anyway, it’s a pretty handy little feature for figuring out those last few summer vacations.