With Streetview and Earth, Google’s mapping solution is by far the best out there. It makes sense that it finally beat map pioneer Mapquest in terms of traffic. With MyMaps, anyone can create maps to promote their business, or to share some geographical knowledge.
MyMaps made it really simple for anyone to create maps, maybe too simple: you can create markers that contain descriptions and media files, but that is pretty much it. Mapping is like blogging, it is about sharing a knowledge with the rest of the world, and just like blogging, anybody should get the attributions he deserves.< Where MyMaps stops, Click2Map begins: Click2Map is the rich Google Maps editor that I often covered on this blog. With Click2Map, you can customize your markers, password-protect your maps, create thousands of markers and manage them from a personal database, auto-cluster your markers, do batch operations, …
Yesterday, the team released a new feature that will definitely tease your curiosity: You can now fully customize the look & feel of your Google Maps!
You could already play around with the design of your maps before publishing them with Click2Map, but the customization tool wasn’t going that deep, and you had to press ok in a dialog box before seeing the changes. Now You can control all the aspects of the map: Fonts, background colors, border colors, sidebar elements, monetization. For some paying accounts, you can even append a url and an email address in the footer of the map.
I did a video for the team, showing all the new features, so I might as well just let the video do the talking:
It is the first time that a service makes the customization of Google Maps available to anybody. This is not Click2Map’s most robust feature, but it is one of the most seducing. I highly recommend playing around with it: You’ll find yourself liking the result and embedding it on your site in no time 😉
As you can see below, I embedded a map that respects the colors of my blog. Pretty neat!