Google maps: more exciting developments

I was thrilled by Google's integration of 'My Maps' and Google/Picasa's web albums. Commentators who think Google's only success is search are ignoring Google Maps and Gmail, both of which are steadily consuming market share (ex: Google Maps):

Google Inc. to unite mapping mashups - Yahoo! News

... Google has been steadily gaining ground in recent months. In June, Google's maps attracted 28.9 million U.S. visitors, a 28 percent increase from the same time last year, Media Metrix said. Meanwhile, Yahoo's mapping traffic fell 12 percent to 29.6 million visitors. Mapquest continued to hold a comfortable lead with 53.9 million visitors, a 3 percent increase from last year.
[jg: See update re: Mapquest ..]

Now Google is taking this to the next level:

Google Inc. to unite mapping mashups - Yahoo! News

... Google introduced My Maps in April to give users a way to save and share their own mashups.

Now, users with Google log-ins will be able to pick from more than 100 mapplets to customize and save their own maps. Google expects the number of mapplets to increase as word about the service spreads. To encourage the phenomenon, Google's own engineers also contributed mapplets...

All of which, we can expect, will work on the iPhone. By the way [1].

[1] There is supposedly no GPS in iPhone 1.0 Apple has come up with some semi-reasonable workarounds. I wonder why they couldn't do it ...

Update: I had the impression Mapquest sent money back to companies that included their services and I commented on that, but "NoTime4Foolz" corrected me (see comments):

Actually, companies pay Mapquest to use their maps. They have a business solutions group that sells enterprise software. Outside of those clients, they have market share because they're still excellent. Not as pretty as Google's maps in some cases, but dependable, easy to use, and accurate.