"As well as searching online Maps for towns, highways, or roads," Joe Mucheru and Jarda Bengl of Google wrote today, "Google Maps users can now find local businesses. This could be a burger place in Lagos, a garage in Kampala, a hairdresser in Accra or an airport shuttle in Dakar."

Today's announcement included pointers to the Local Business Center and Maps API, so users in Africa can help fill out the maps all the more.

Now, instead of pasting a Google Map into an email you send, any Google Maps URL and any U.S. address (for the time being) you enclose will automatically come with a map embedded.

When it comes to Google Buzz, pasting a Google Maps link into the post box will cause the system to automatically produce an image preview of that location.

The addition of transit directions is just an initial release and will contain transit information for 11 U.S. cities, with "more to come" in the near future.

Microsoft has a bit of catching up to do in the realm of transit directions, as Google Maps offers the same directions - for buses, subways and trains - in more than 446 cities worldwide.

In its initial release, Bing Maps will offer transit directions for Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New Jersey, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, and Vancouver. By comparison, Google has transit maps for cities in the U.S., Canada, Central America, South America, Asia, Europe, Oceania and Africa.

Of course, Google has had a five year head start on transit directions, which originally launched as a Google Labs project in 2005 before becoming a full-fledged feature in late 2007. We're glad to see Bing finally get into transit directions and help to serve the more than 10.7 billion yearly public transit passengers it mentions.

Applications can use drawings for selecting regions of the map to search or highlight, as well as for annotations. This simple interface offers a surprising range of features for developers building applications upon Google Maps.

There's a working demo embedded on the Google Geo Developers Blog. Try it out; it's easy to use, but it's surprisingly flexible. While it's easy to make stupid doodles like I did, the interface is quite precise, so this new library can definitely be used carefully to mark up or highlight maps. Developers could build this into their applications for fun or work purposes.

What uses could you see for the new Google Maps drawing library?

Last month, Google rolled out +snippets to help users and publishers share outside Web pages to Google Plus using the +1 button. But +snippets have also become the primary way other Google services are integrated into Plus. Maps now joins Google's Books, Offers and product searches as the major Google services with +snippet integration.

If you're planning a trip with friends, you can share maps with saved directions as a +snippet. You can also share individual places or location search results. The +snippet displays a thumbnail of the map, a title and a description, and it allows the user to add a comment and share with circles or individuals just like a normal Plus post.

Last month, Google added its internal g.co URL shortener as a feature of Google Maps, making it easier to share maps with anyone on or off Google Plus. Any Google Map can now be shared with a tiny shortlink from g.co, which always indicates a link to a Google.com property.

Have you shared stuff to Google Plus using +snippets?

When Google Maps launched -- with maps assembled client-side, in JavaScript! -- I was one of the band of tinkerers around the globe who poked at Google's obfuscated code until we figured out how to embed their maps in our own pages. It was a ton of fun, not only doing the reverse engineering, but seeing the various discoveries and hacks other people were making: embedding multiple maps in a single page, swapping out the map tiles, using custom map markers, making markers move, loading real-time data onto maps...These days, it's hard to fathom a Web without embeddable maps. Wasn't it always that way? To Google's eternal credit, instead of shutting these hacks down, they recognized the demand and legitimized it in the form of their mapping API.

According to the Google Geo Developers Blog post, nearly half of the almost 5,000 mashups on Programmable Web's dashboard use the Google Maps API. In an effort to show the widespread influence of the API, Keir Clarke from Google Maps Mania created a mashup of mashups that we've included below. From real-time tracking of buses in NYC to mapping out news down to a block-by-block level, the mashup shows where across the world Google Maps mashups have been created using the API.

The feature, which has been in testing in Germany, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, has been added to 10 more domains in 8 additional languages and should make searching for places that much easier.

The search suggestion will be available beginning today in China, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan, United States and the United Kingdom.

Overall, this is nice update to Google maps, as it allows users to zoom in closer and see buildings and other locations with more detail. As Google's Randy Wilson - a member of Google's Imagery Team - notes, "even when looking at familiar areas, seeing driving directions overlaid on 45° imagery will give you a whole new understanding of the neighborhood."

Google introduced Search by Voice in 2008 and has been rolling that functionality out into different parts of the Googlesphere since. Now Google Maps 4.1 comes with voice search.

• business name
• business category
• city, state
• ZIP code
• postal address
• intersection, city, state
• airport code
• latitude longitude

Hands-free it is not, however. To start the search you still need to open Google Maps and hit "call" prior to making your search.

The install is available on qualifying phones at m.google.com/maps.

An interesting aspect of the language settings the ability to select not just your language but, if it's English, the accent you use. I wonder if this functionality will be available to Spanish-speakers or whether the different accents within Yue Chinese will eventually be recognized.

Google also said that the ads could be integrated into their new Mapplets map mashup making service on a revenue sharing basis. Users would be paid by the click, similar to the current Adsense offerings, and could limit the number of sponsor ads that would appear in their Mapplets or turn them off completely. "This is something you will completely control," said Google engineer Andrew Eland at Google's Developer Day in London yesterday.

Google's preview Mapplets might give a hint of how the service could work. Two of Google's example Mapplets are commerce-oriented: movie showtimes and real estate search. It is easy to see how Google could offer company's paid preferential treatment on this type of maps mashup. These paid placements would not necessarily resemble current Adsense text ads, but could be more fluidly integrated into the look and feel of Google Maps.

Like other Adwords ads, map ads could be highly targeted, not only by subject matter or keyword, but also by location.

Google knows that, when you're on the go, you're searches often have to do with where you are and what you're doing. If you're looking for a steak house, you don't simply want to know the closest steak house, you want to know what reviewers on Yelp or Zagat thought of the place. You also want to know some simple information like whether or not it's open, the neighborhood it's in and that sort of thing.

In today's update, Google Maps for Android has updated its design for Place pages and begun offering "Reviews from around the Web" and reviews from other Google users. As for search results, you can now filter your search results not only by distance and rating, but by business hours, neighborhood and related searches. And the addition of real-time Google Latitude means that if you and your friends are using Latitude, you can find each other that much easier. Never mind the blue car down the street, you're the blue dot on the screen.

The newest version of Google Maps is available for download in the Android Marketplace and works with Android 1.6 and higher. Google Latitude requires Android 2.2+.

Still, for all the beauty of Google's directions, "street view," and "search nearby," the top-down views of our world have always been a bit fuzzy and squint-inducing. Until now. Thanks to Google hitching a ride on GeoEye-1, that's all about to change. And today, we saw the first example of what's to come.

Wired has posted the first photo from GeoEye, and it's amazingly crisp.

Here's a comparison between the new satellite image and the current resolution (GeoEye-1 image, top):

Looking for more resolution than that? You're going to need to get security clearance. The US Federal Government restricts distribution of higher-resolution imagery, even though the image the satellite is capturing has a more detailed resolution (43 cm).

Currently, there is no specific date for when the imagery will be added to Google Maps and Google Earth.

One thing is for sure: When this new high-resolution imagery becomes available, Google Maps sightseeing will get a great deal more interesting.

Now, Google is saying that the "effort to improve our bike maps has surpassed our happiest expectations", with tens of thousands of suggestions from users across the country.

More than 10,000 people have submitted about 25,000 suggestions for improvements to our bike maps. With their help, we've added bike lane and trail data for an additional 80 cities since our initial launch. This is an exciting and humbling response from the Google Maps community. It's like having 10,000 new members of our bike maps team, contributing their time and energy to make Google Maps more useful for everyone.

The blog goes on to give a number of examples, from users pointing out little bits of trails and bike-specific tunnels to entire trail systems to be added to the maps.

Last week we looked at a report by research firm Forrester that says that a majority of U.S. consumers are willing co-creators - that is, they are willing to assist in the creation of a product - and Google's bicycle maps effort seems like a prime example of this.

For those of you (like me) who find yourself wishing you could get biking directions on your iPhone, the mobile website is a great alternative to the native iPhone app. If you're out and about and see something that's wrong, join in on the effort and use Google's "Report a Problem" tool.

Walking directions are available everywhere Google offers driving directions.

Currently, Google is the only mapping service that offers walking directions. Ask.com used to offer walking directions, but that feature went away when Ask migrated away from its own mapping platform to Microsoft's Virtual Earth three weeks ago.

While Microsoft's Virtual Earth updated its imagery with another major (14 terabyte) update today, it's routing functions have not seen any updates lately. In terms of overall functionality and user interface design, it is very much on par with Google Maps (and, in terms of its imagery, often much better than Google Maps). However, it never quite achieved the popularity of Google Maps.

The walking directions are currently only available through the web version of Google Maps. As of now, you can not chose them in the iPhone Maps application, though that would obviously be a very useful feature to add and hopefully Apple and Google will do so soon.

Google announced yesterday that it would be bringing elevation to its Maps API, ensuring a whole new slew of Google Maps mashups.

As Google points out in its blog, the most obvious use for elevation is in planning out something like a bicycle route. "In fact you'll be happy to hear," the company writes in its blog "that the Maps API bicycling directions already factor in elevation".

Already, for bicycling junkies like myself, the ability to check out routes and elevations on sites like MapMyRide is extremely useful, if not just really interesting. The mashup on Google's blog post about this new feature shows how the data can be used to give a side-view of any path, alerting you to any unforseen inclines or descents.

Aside from bicycling, there are any number of uses for this sort of data - avoiding hills in icy winter travel, figuring out sight lines or just choosing the best route to drive that moving van and not have everything slide to the back end.

While there are other services, as we've mentioned, that have already offered this feature, there's something about it coming to Google Maps. We already use Google Maps to plot out our routes and get directions, so why go somewhere else to get elevation? Now, you might not have to. We're hoping this gets added as a standard feature on Google Maps soon.

Take a minute to play with the embedded map below and see how the elevation data can be used with Google Maps.