Google tiles

I was playing Scrabble with my daughter the other night and I suddenly thought of Google, which I'm sure happens to all of you. I wasn't thinking of the word Google itself. I was thinking of Google tiles. What do I mean when I say Google tiles? Well, if you have visited their new map site, the beta site for Google maps, they found a new way to draw pages based on the technology that I think is going to become more and more used.

Let me show you what I mean. Let's say I've got a map of my neighborhood and here's the interstate, and here's one of the major crossroads and here are some of the other roads that come through here. Let's say my house is right there. Well, if I want more detail or if I want to go left or right, east or west, north or south in another map site I'd hit a button and it would redraw this entire page based on the information that I had given it. Google maps takes a different approach. What they're doing is taking all their map information, all the road information and then create a series of tiles. So if I want to see where does the interstate go down here and I want to move a little bit this way, it doesn't have to redraw the whole page. All it does is go down and get these 3 tiles and move these 3 off the page. So it becomes a much more efficient way to get information because it's not having to go out and hit servers all the time, redrawing the same thing every time. It just goes out and gets the data as it needs it.

What I think is interesting beyond this though is what are the applications other people are going to do to layer on to what Google has already done. So we already say that blue are, say roads. Let's say we wanted to know about utilities, we wanted to know where is the cable grid? Where are the power lines? You know, I think utilities are going to have an interest in being able to overlay this information. What about school districts? You know, where are the school boundaries? If you're a realtor or you are a parent or you are a member of the school board, you're going to want to know where the school boundaries are. You're going to want to be able to overlay that information. Obviously, marketers are going to want to be able to overlay information about things like, say overlay census data, population, age, households, marketing demographics, consumption information or politicians are going to want to be able to get information on precincts, voting levels, registration, party registration information and overlay that on the same framework.

So I think that Google has created an unintentional de facto standard with its tiles and more and more people are going to take the work it's done and we're all going to be thinking about applications that use Google tiles.