Let’s say you are visiting a city for a long weekend and you want to be able to see as many sights as possible and experience the city. Often with travel books or guides we get in the habit of building separate lists of the places we want to see and then look them up on the map later.
Google Maps recently opened up their My Maps program which allows you to plot your own points of interests and way points along the way. What’s really great about this feature is that you have the power of Google Local and just by searching you can locate restaurants, attractions, parks and then add them to your custom map. Points of interest can be personalized with one of the built-in icons or you can upload your own.
My Maps is especially great when you are traveling with others because of the sharing options enable you to invite others to help edit your map together.
This weekend my fiance and I are traveling to Phoenix. She’s the foodie, I’m the sightseer. She was able to plot all of the places to eat and I mapped what we would be doing. Here’s our results:
Building the map is easy. Just visit maps.google.com and click on the My Maps feature. You need to set our map as public to enable the sharing features. Google has created a great video to demonstrate the step-by-step process of using the mapping tools.
What really sets this above the rest though are the mobile capabilities. With every map created Google automatically generates a KML file enabling you to embed the map into your website or load the points into Google Earth. But KML files can also be loaded into the iPhone. To load your map open the Google Maps application on your iPhone and in the search box, enter the URL to your KML file.
For testing purposes you can view our Phoenix map by entering “http://tinyurl.com/iphonemaptest” (without quotes) into your search box. I shortened the URL using TinyURL to make it easier to type. Google Maps brings up all of your points of interest and you can click on each pin and get directions to each of the locations from your current. And with the GPS you can see what’s around you to be sure you don’t miss a single thing.
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