Thanks to everyone that came along tonight to hear my talk on Google Mapplets at the Adobe User Group. The discussion went beyond Google Maps and Mapplets, but also included Street View and other mashups and location based services. For those who are unfamiliar with Google Mapplets, they are small applications that run within Google Maps. Mapplets build upon and extend the standard functionality of Google Maps and are already being used to create some very interesting mashups. For example, you can overlay several published Mapplets from the Google Mapplet directory to get a combined view of several overlays.
Mapplets are essentially Google Gadgets (which are iGoogle widgets) that interface with the standard Google Maps API. They are hosted on Google’s servers, as opposed to a typical Google Maps application running on your server.
Mapplets provide exposure to existing mapping applications via the Google Mapplet directory, but more importantly by being used in conjunction with another Mapplet (or Mapplets) in a way that the original creator would have never thought of. If you’re working with any mapping project, I definitely encourage looking into Mapplets.
For more information visit http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/mapplets/, Google provides lots of good documentation on this topic.
