brianshaler:

The next revolution to online mapping.

I heard some chatter about this yesterday but finally checked it out. Some of the best ideas are so simple. “Why didn’t I think of that?” Google Maps revolutionized how we used maps, blowing away MapQuest and other choppy mapping tools. Animating zooms, allowing users to drag the map, and asynchronously loading new image tiles. These were all solutions to a specific problem.

The new approach Google is taking is a ground-up re-think of how we can view maps. The map data is stored in vector format, but we were previously thinking of new and better ways of experiencing images created from those vectors. Streaming tiles at various resolutions is a solution to an image mapping problem. But what if you throw away all those problems and all those solutions and stream the *vector* data to the client?

Google has once again completely changed the online mapping game.

Official Google Blog: The next generation of mobile maps