Have you ever been scouting out—okay, stalking—an area on Google Maps and been frustrated that there's a giant college campus-sized hole in the map? Now you can do something about it.
Google Map Maker is Google's user-generated-but-content-reviewed map making tool. The service has been made available to 183 countries that didn't have or give access to digital map making services, expanding the reach of Google Maps from 15% to 30% of the world's population, and now it's finally making like Prince Akeem and coming to America. The heads of the project, Lalitesh Katragadda and Manik Gupta, explain that it will offer a chance to improve information about university campuses, biking and walking trails, and other areas currently inaccessible by Google Maps.
The service relies on user-generated edits to whatever information Google Maps already has, which are then reviewed by an in-house team at Google. Your past submissions are taken into account as your edit is analyzed, and if your edit is accepted, it goes live within a few minutes. It is currently only available through the web client, which now includes access to Street View, but Google (as well as common sense) implies that mobile versions will be forthcoming. [TechCrunch]