Google Maps now has “Saved Locations”, linked to my Google account. It’s still a bit iffy, though. At first I assumed that adding a location would save the current view, but in fact it does nothing of the sort — it geocodes whatever you type into the New Location field and saves the resulting view, with a popup for the label you’ve added. Also, if you type in a location in lowercase with auto-saving of locations enabled, you will end up with duplicated locations — one lowercased and one capitalized — if you click on the lowercased one:

It would have been more intuitive to me to have a “Save this location” button next to the “Link to this page” button. At the moment, I still find it easier to bookmark permalinked Google maps views and then have Google Browser Sync backup my bookmarks for me. In other words, this new feature adds no value (for me).

There still no “open in Google Earth” button on the toolbar — we already know that appending “&output=kml” to the permlink is all it takes. Finally, I hope this is the first step to syncing my Google Earth placemarks with Google Maps — my Google Maps Saved Locations, my Google Earth Community posts and my Google Earth Places content are all similar — so why not make them syncable?