Googlified

Google is all out today to celebrate Valentine’s Day - the special holiday for your special someone.

Valentine’s Day or Saint Valentine’s Day is a holiday celebrated on February 14. In North America and Europe, it is the traditional day on which lovers express their love for each other by sending Valentine’s cards, presenting flowers, or offering confectionery. [Wikipedia]

Other than the logo shown above, Google also changed Google Docs’ theme to pink, matching the holiday’s color, and that the little person in Google Maps is now standing on a heart-shaped thing instead of the green, bubble-shaped thing - too bad, still alone.

And the YouTube logo.

I still prefer to call it Singles Awareness Day, or perhaps, even simpler, February 14th or  the 45th day of the year. :)

The Google Maps team today added 12 more cities to Google Maps’ Street View, bringing the total number of cities to, ehh, one, two, three … 30! The new cities are:

• Albany/Schenectady, NY
• Boise, ID
• Juneau, AK
• Kansas City, MO
• Manchester, NH
• Milwaukee, WI
• Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC
• San Antonio, TX
• Salt Lake City, UT

I was so expecting to see Columbus up there this time, and now they let me down, once again.

In a related news, you can now view embedded Google Maps/Street View in Google Reader. I find that really annoying actually. Yeah, it’s nice to access more multimedia right from Google Reader, but it FRIES up the little fox, like every single time.

Maybe it’s time for an upgrade. :)

The Google Maps team recently created a little toy called Recent Edits Viewer where you can view the recent edits made with the location correction feature on Google Maps. This is pretty much like the Flickrvision, Twittervision, and ehh, WikipediaVision.

You can grab the data file (updates periodically) here to build your own app or do whatever you want with it.

The unfortunate Jeff got 42% of his brain indexed by the Google Intruder(v2) 007.

[video by thevacationeers; via Google Blogoscoped]

Evidences from various sources shown that Google’s Street View army is marching in many major New Zealand cities, including capital city Wellington. In one case, the driver of the Google Street View was kind enough to let this guy take close-up pictures of the car - even the equipments inside the car.

[original photo by Bevan Rudge]

As Google’s street view cars traveling across the U.S., they capture a lot of weird things. And since these cars are on road, the chance of capturing (or being in) a car accident is pretty high (according to this site, there are ~6.5 million car accidents in 2005 in the U.S.).

Here are the links to Google Maps for the above photos, starting from the one on top-left (clockwise): [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] [ 4 ].

According to California Department of Motor Vehicles, “Most drivers, no matter how carefully they drive, will be involved in at least one traffic accident during their lifetime. Your chances of being injured or killed in a traffic accident are greater than you might think. One person in three will be injured or killed.”

Drive safe.

[via Jalopnik and Tom]

Google changed the little yellow person icon with a snowman icon on Google Maps Street View today. They did the same thing for Halloween, just used a witch instead of a snowman.

The last time I made a snowman was like two years ago. I was going to make one this winter, but I think I am a bit too old for doing that by myself. Ahh, the old days.

[thanks Tom. :)]

The Google Maps team today announced 8 more new cities to be added to Street View. The new cities are Boston, Dallas, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Detroit, and Providence. If they are continuing with this trend, Columbus should be part of the next update, which will probably happen around February and March next year.

Along with this update comes the feature that allows you to embed Street View inside your web pages. Like how you will embed a normal map, you just have to copy & paste the HTML code found in the “Link to this page” when you have the Street View window opened.

Continuing with this trend, Columbus (15th largest city in the U.S.) should be part of the next update, which will probably happen around February and March next year. :P

Google Maps for Mobile has a new feature, “My Location“, that lets you know your approximate location on your Google Maps Mobile-enabled phone with a simple click. All you need to do is press “0″ on your phone to see your location on the map.

If you have a GPS-enabled device, this blue dot corresponds to your GPS location. At times, or if you do not have a GPS-enabled phone you might see the blue dot surrounded by a light blue circle to indicate uncertainty about your location.

Lifehacker reader tmobilewinguse said, “It had me within a half mile of my location which is pretty good for non-GPS.” Another Lifehacker reader commented, “Mine gives me a 5 mile radius. I’m somewhere in Center City, anywhere from 6th street to 1st street.”

I remember seeing something similar in a movie (probably The Sentinel) that the government use that to track down people.

Google Maps today introduced a new viewing mode, the “Terrain” layer. It’s useful for knowing the general physical landscape of an area. To switch to the Terrain mode, just click on the Terrain button on the top right corner, and zoom into specific location for more detail imagery.

As you may have noticed, the Hybrid button is gone. Well, it’s still on Google Maps, they just hide it under the Satellite view. When you choose Satellite, the Hybrid mode will be enabled by default, and you can uncheck the “Show labels” box to get back the original Satellite view.

The Terrain mode looks quite similar to the Maps view in Yahoo! Maps.

UPDATE: Google Maps added another feature that allows users to enable “wiki-style collaboration” for their maps on “My Maps”. [Thanks Kat. :)]

Cyberstalkers (and the alike) will miss a lot of fun. :)

There’s an Easter Egg in the above photo. See if you can find it. :P

[inspired by Bloobeard]

Google today launched a new localized version of Google Maps for Swiss users. The data used in this new version are likely from Endoxon, a mapping company based in Switzerland Google acquired last year.

Also, Google announced the availability of Google Transit trip planner in several European cities, including London, Zürich, and Turin.

I want to go somewhere in Europe for vacation. :)