I was playing Scrabble with my daughter the other night andI suddenly thought of Google, which I'm sure happens to all of you. I wasn'tthinking of the word Google itself. I was thinking of Google tiles. What do Imean when I say Google tiles? Well, if you have visited their new map site, thebeta site for Google maps, they found a new way to draw pages based on thetechnology that I think is going to become more and more used.
Let me show you what I mean. Let's say I've got a map of myneighborhood and here's the interstate, and here's one of the major crossroadsand here are some of the other roads that come through here. Let's say my houseis right there. Well, if I want more detail or if I want to go left or right,east or west, north or south in another map site I'd hit a button and it wouldredraw this entire page based on the information that I had given it. Googlemaps takes a different approach. What they're doing is taking all their mapinformation, all the road information and then create a series of tiles. So ifI want to see where does the interstate go down here and I want to move alittle bit this way, it doesn't have to redraw the whole page. All it does isgo down and get these 3 tiles and move these 3 off the page. So it becomes amuch more efficient way to get information because it's not having to go outand hit servers all the time, redrawing the same thing every time. It just goesout and gets the data as it needs it.
What I think is interesting beyond this though is what arethe applications other people are going to do to layer on to what Google hasalready done. So we already say that blue are, say roads. Let's say we wantedto know about utilities, we wanted to know where is the cable grid? Where arethe power lines? You know, I think utilities are going to have an interest inbeing able to overlay this information. What about school districts? You know,where are the school boundaries? If you're a realtor or you are a parent or youare a member of the school board, you're going to want to know where the schoolboundaries are. You're going to want to be able to overlay that information.Obviously, marketers are going to want to be able to overlay information aboutthings like, say overlay census data, population, age, households, marketingdemographics, consumption information or politicians are going to want to beable to get information on precincts, voting levels, registration, partyregistration information and overlay that on the same framework.
So I think that Google has created an unintentional de factostandard with its tiles and more and more people are going to take the workit's done and we're all going to be thinking about applications that use Googletiles.
