Find Your Way... The Google Way!

"There's my house!"

I found myself at Google Maps today after a friend at work mentioned it (since I'm not sure how long its been in beta, this might be old news to many readers).

Google has always been known to take something already in use and put a cool, new spin on it (cool being the operative word there). The same mentality is evident on their maps site too. The directions part of it is pretty standard compared to what you get on Yahoo! Maps or Mapquest(ofcourse there's the trademark Google simplicity in the way you get a single text box to type in your addresses). But the site definitely gains a few notches on the 'cool' scale by virtue of its maps. The dragging capability is fun and combined with the zoom-in feature, you can get to the place you want and at any granularity, pretty fast. Raising the 'cool' bar further is the Satellite image feature with which you now get your directions on a Satellite image rather than the plain ol' two-dimensional map. Never mind that it doesn't add even an iota of value. But it does make us go "Whoa! Way cool!" when we first see it!

Maps have always been indispensable but now Google has managed to make them fun too!