Keyhole Maps Trial

I decided to try out Keyhole and see what its about. Word of google’s purchase has been floating around for months now. It resurfaced today on Google Code (2). It seems like there’s a lot of overlap with Google Maps whose geek factor was upgraded after The Foot Stompin’ 177 (Pookie BadMuffin) found this article on hacking Google Maps.

Keyhole’s interface is very easy to use. The transition between levels of detail is slow but smooth and overall its a very cool app. In the screen cap above I entered in the latitude and longitude of a geocache we have yet to find. Keyhole flew from my previously selected location (Atlanta) and landed gravefully above the Appalachian Trial. I had to zoom out a bit to get the proper labels. I’m not sure how useful it is for geocaching in particular since the detail of the terrain is low, at least for this cache. When I searched for my home address, it zoomed in to street level and I could see the top of my apartment complex from a few hundred feet above.

The most intriguing part of it is not what it does so much as what it let’s you do. Over at the Keyhole Community BBS people post points of interests (POIs) as xml files. Other users can simply click on these attachments and the open Keyhole application will glide over to the new POI, no matter where it in the world. The best data is for POIs in the USA though. I tried to get a street level view of Istanbul, Turkey but instead, no matter how far I zoomed in, all I got was a red circle that says “Istanbul” next to it.

All told, it has as much potential as Google Maps for photo location stuff, perhaps more since it doesn’t have to “hacked” to insert your own waypoints and such. Google Maps looks better though IMO. I’m sure at some point in the future there will be a tighter integration of these mapping technologies along with Picasa and Blogger, all under Google’s wing, such that photolocation will be available to the average user.

In the meantime, Keyhole user’s can make these nifty overlays.