Google Maps - My Maps
I’ve been watching with interested as a whole lot of people get excited about the new “My Maps” functionality in Google Maps. It looks quite impressive, but is really nothing new, well not to me anyway. We’ve been writing on-line digitizing functionality for a few years now adding more and more functionality with every release, the difference being that our product is a commercial one, which you will not find too many free-to-access public deployments of it which allows digitizing functionality.
Google Maps and our product have always had quite a different focus/market position and this is the first time that they’ve crossed paths (Ignoring the export to KMZ functionality I wrote last year). However, rather than starting to worry about another major competitor, I maintain the same position that I had when writing my Thesis (gCommerce - How GIS is facilitating modern business), that publicly available mapping solutions will just increase the usage of on-line maps and ultimately lead to generating more business as a whole for the industry.
I do feel a vague sense of jealously watching all the praise that I am reading for the “My Maps” functionality, but such is life I guess !