Saturday, May 27, 2006

Google makes Aussie and Kiwi street maps official

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Google software engineer Patrick Jordan has posted to the Google Maps API Blog to make street level mapping on Google Maps official for Australians and New Zealanders. From the post titled: "Aussie Maps! Kiwi Maps! Beauty Mate!":

G'day, and welcome to an exciting new world of proper online maps for Australia and New Zealand, which we added in the nick of time for our Open House event at the Google Sydney office. Google Maps doesn't yet support full address search or business search in Australia or New Zealand, but we wanted to give API developers a head start on building cool AU/NZ mashups. The Aussie and Kiwi maps are automatically available to anyone who uses v2 of the API, so please upgrade if you're still using v1.

If you see any bugs in the new maps, please let us know via the discussion forum or our feedback form.


Google Maps Mania broke this news back on 18-May and this blog post is the first official word from Google since that date. The Sydney Morning Herald (as well as their blog) and The Age in Melbourne both picked up on the news tip from Google Maps Mania to let Australians know about the availability of this new mapping layer and mashup possibilities that are now here. Attempts to contact The New Zealand Herald and other Kiwi media outlets didn't yield any response. If you're interested in starting your own mashup, check out the Google Maps API page to get started and be sure to drop me a line when you've finished your mashup so I can let others know about it here on Google Maps Mania! That goes for any of you that see new Aussie and Kiwi mashups - let me know! :)

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I coundt wait for the official launch of Google Maps NZ so i made a mashup.
Currently it only support street names :(

vitit Mayo

Fraser said...

Looks like it was picked up by The Dominion Post with this article in today's paper.

Antony said...

The satellite imagery for Australia appears to have disappeared today?...

allthings said...

I look forward to when the address search works - it does not for AU addresses ;(

kn said...

It is great to see Google Maps for Australia. I did notice however that the maps do not line up with the satellite images.

I found the same problem with my own GPS tracks, so it seems that Google Maps is fairly accurate, whereas the satelitte images are not. We are talking 15-20 meters out, I would guess.

Calvin said...

the REAL Mayo link:)

http://h.new21.org/mayo/