Google Maps at Home and at Work

Street View Now Available in Estonia and Latvia

Google have made a number of announcements concerning Google Maps today. They have officially announced the availability of Street View in the Baltic states of Latvia and Estonia that Google Maps Mania reported on yesterday.

Save Home & Work Locations

Google has also added a feature to Google Maps that allows users to save home and work locations. If you go to the 'My Places' tab in Google Maps you now can save your home and work locations.

Once your locations are saved you can use 'home' or 'work' when searching for directions to quickly add those locations and avoid having to type in the full address.

New Google Places API Features

For Google Maps API users Google has added keyword search and rank by distance to the Google Places API.

The Google Places API filters places by 100 different categories, such as restaurant, clothing_store, and bar. The keyword search feature allows users to search for places based on an arbitrary text string. For example, instead of just searching for restaurants you can now search for Mexican restaurants etc.

The rank by distance feature allows map developers the option to rank searched for venues and places by distance from a set location. This means you can now offer users the choice of viewing search results both by prominence and distance.

There is a good demo map showing both keyword search and rank by distance in action here.

Polish UEFA 2012 Stadiums in Street View

The Official Polish Google Blog has announced the release of Street View for the four Polish soccer stadium to be used for this summer's UEFA European Football Championship. Now you can use Street View to get a sense of what it is like to be down on the pitch looking up at the towering stands.

London Coffee on Google Maps

London Coffee Map

I've started playing with the Places Library in the Google Maps API.

One feature of the library is that it lets you load venues that match a particular name. I've used this feature to show the locations of cafes belonging to the bigger coffee chains in London.

The London Coffee Map lets you find cafes run by the Monmouth Coffee Company, Starbucks, Costa Coffee and Caffe Nero. If you click on a marker you can view the cafe's Google Places rating and its telephone number.

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Introducing the Google Places Library

The Google Places API is now on general release and a Places Library has been added to the Google Maps API.

The new Places Library allows map developers to display venues in Google Places on a Google Map. The venues can be added either via a bounding box or within a radius of a centre point. The displayed venues can be refined by type (e.g. gym, food, zoo, art gallery etc) or by name (e.g. Starbucks).



The Places Library can also display details about the returned venues, including full address information and user ratings.

The Places Library for the Google Maps API doesn't seem to support check-ins. So if you want to give your users the ability to check-in at venues it looks like you will have to use the Google Places API itself with your Google Maps.

Via: Google Geo Developers Blog

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