Google Earth 6.2: A Seamless Globe That's Ready for Sharing on Google+
Google just launched a major update for Google Earth. The program now offers one seamless image of the globe instead of a patchwork of separate images that made the Earth look a bit like a quilt in earlier versions.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Earth has spent years accumulating imagery piecemeal — periodic imagery refreshes dating back to 2007 and the addition of panoramic photos in 2010 layered new content onto a globe that still visibly stitched separate image tiles together. Version 6.2 closes that gap by rendering the planet as one continuous surface instead of a patchwork quilt.
The timing matters beyond cartography: this lands two days after Google announced sweeping privacy-policy changes and amid criticism of Search Plus Your World for favoring Google+ content. Baking Google+ sharing directly into a flagship desktop application is the same integration strategy applied to another major product surface.
First-order effects
- Users of Google Earth 6.2 get a visually seamless globe rather than mismatched tiles, removing the most visible quality gap between Google's virtual globe and its own marketing imagery.
- Sharing is now built into the app itself, routing screenshots and views through Google+ rather than requiring users to export images and post them elsewhere.
Second-order effects
- Every Google product that gains native Google+ hooks converts its existing user base into potential social-network traffic, raising the stakes for rivals like Facebook and Twitter whose distribution depends on being the default share destination.
- Mapping competitors now face a moving target on presentation quality: seamless rendering resets the baseline for what a consumer virtual globe is expected to look like.
Third-order effects
- If Google keeps threading Google+ through search, music, Android, and Earth under the unified privacy policy announced in January 2012, the company's product portfolio consolidates around a single identity graph — with antitrust and privacy regulators the likely audience for how far that goes.
- Virtual globes drift from reference tools toward shareable media, where the value of a map lies less in looking things up than in showing other people what you found.
The trend: Consumer mapping is shifting from a static lookup utility to a socially integrated medium, with Google using product-by-product Google+ integration to bootstrap its social network.