Microsoft employee and MSDN blogger Jason Sack is very impressed with Google Earth, But thinks he can do better (good, I too love competition). He also wonders if the application will ever be more than a niche product.
Yes of course it will. It will completely revolutionize how we mentally place information. Via Jason Sack’s comments, Dean Heckler provides an eloquent response:
A quick look at its file format reveals its simple to create your own content – the same feeling I got when I looked at HTML for the first time in 1995. This leads me to profess that Google Earth is not a niche application, but the first truly engaging Earth Browser.
The basic version of Google Earth is free — and plenty impressive. This makes life harder for those inhabiting the GIS Earth ogling competitive space. GIS professional and blogger James Fee weighs in.
In the amateur atlas aficionado space, I can’t help but feel that Software MacKiev’s gorgeously designed 3D Weather Globe & Atlas suffers from atrocious product launch timing. At any other time I’d have forked over the $40, but now I’d rather wait for the Mac version of Google Earth, even though Google Earth Mac likely won’t have the lovely interface MacKiev’s product does. That’s because in the end, levels of detail, the open standards and concomitant hackability (for example, the ability to add your own weather map overlays should you so choose, or anything else for that matter) are far more important. That said, I would love it were Google to buy MacKiev’s product for the GUI.
“After mulling it over, we think there will be a business here — eventually,” they write, though they feel the application won’t really get off the ground until it moves to cell phones and PDAs. This is a strange thing to think, as there are plenty of applications, for example web browsers and the Google search service itself, that became wildly popular before they became mobile and minute.
And while there certainly is a future in Google Earth for advertising dollars, the article does not recognize why Google Earth (and Google Maps) is a disruptive technology: It uses open standards, not proprietary ones, and it encourages user contributions and hacking by making its APIs and XML accessible. Google Earth will be a runaway success because it will make itself useful to users in ways that Google itself does not try to fathom, though Google will control the ability to advertise on the results of this user creativity. That’s very clever.
Walt Mossberg reviews Google Earth in his weekly Wall Street Journal column. He basically sees the the application as amazing eye candy, but not much more:
… there are times when even a hardened skeptic has to admit to amazement and delight at the sheer coolness of some of the things you can do on a personal computer today.
…The trouble is, I’m not sure how practical Google Earth is for most people.
Walt misses the most impressive aspect of Google Earth — its ability to let anyone publish dynamically updating content to it. This makes Google Earth far more powerful than it currently looks in its naked newborn state.
But Walt does make an (unintentional) point. Before GE can realize its promise he would need to master new file formats, a new way of visualizing information, and familiarity with a completely new browsing application. This means a learning curve. Flattening it is the job of this blog.
Notes on the political, social and scientific impact of networked digital maps and geospatial imagery, with a special focus on Google Earth.