Coming soon for Internet Explorer and Firefox is Click2Map, another tool using the Google Maps protocols. They’re still in beta, but soon they will be releasing a stable version. The purpose of the software is to allow you to create your own Google Maps with your own points of interest marked, without having to write any lines of code. I’ve used a similar service in the past, but it was a huge pain to make new markers, and Click2Map is much easier – the user interface is so much more friendly!
A feature I really like about Click2Map is the ability to publish to a webpage. When I was on Diet to Go, I created a custom map (on that other site) that showed all the DC-area pickup locations. This was helpful to me so that if I was going to be somewhere other than my normal pickup location, I could easily spot what the nearest or most accessible pickup location would be. I think other people could have made use of the map I made, but I had no way to share it. On Click2Map, when you create a webpage from your map, you can specify all kinds of options like how big the zoom controls should be, the width and height of the map, and even whether dragging is allowed. They publish the result to their own site, but it looks like there is an option coming in the future for a widget so you can publish to your own site.
There are a couple of features I would like to see added to Click2Map, though I’m not sure if they’re possible using the Google Maps API. First, it would be awesome to get driving directions from one point to another (and possibly on from there, multi-stop directions), and second I’d love to see the ability to publish walking routes like the Gmap Pedometer can create. If they could add those features, this would be the ultimate third party Google Maps application.
