ReadWriteWeb

One of the big trends on the web is more and more location aware / sensitive web applications. Increasingly powerful mobile devices are enabling this. In the latest episode of RWW Live, today at 3.30pm PST, we'll talk about how the Web is evolving to include more location aware applications and what barriers are still in the way. We'll also talk about privacy and other user concerns and what is being done to address them. We have special guests from Yahoo! Fire Eagle, Four Square and Outside.in on the show today.

Google Maps underwent a major redesign today and the new street view is pretty fantastic. Now users can drag a little human figure named "Pegman" over any streets that light up blue and get a preview of Street View for that location. When Pegman lands, the whole map view turns into a Street View viewer and there's a button to expand that view to take up the whole horizontal length of your browser.

These are very welcome changes that really help take advantage of the eye candy that is Street View in Google Maps. There's a whole lot of changes that were made today, all with the long-term fight for map users and their ad-viewing eyeballs in mind we're sure. Today's changes are great, though.