Google Maps: In-Flight And Below Ground

Google’s been in the news a lot over the past few weeks. Seems as though they’ve never failed to make a headline for the entire length of spring. A lot of the news has been about big stuff, though, and sometimes little, yet interesting things get unfairly shadowed. So let’s talk little for a moment.

Google Maps, a creation molded by many to fit a great number of applications since it’s debut years ago, recently introduced a featured called Street View, which offers (in a growing number of areas around the world) snapshots of places you’d otherwise only get to see with a bird’s-eye view of the landscape. This addition appears to mimic an initiative begun many seasons ago by at team at Amazon to travel about metropolitan areas (and later suburban and rural locales) and photograph street-side locations to give individuals online a better sense of “what they’ll see when they get there.”

But what if you want to play with Google Maps not in order to learn about details on the ground but about details to do with the skies? What do you do then? Turns out Google actually has been thinking about what goes on over our heads recently, too.

In partnership with JetBlue Airways, Google will provide its software to allow passengers on the carrier’s craft to track flights in real time through its in-seat television screens. Speed. Altitude. Location. It’s all going to be available on Channel 13. Also, if that nifty new feature isn’t enough, you’ll also be able to access the same information while on the ground with a Google Maps feature to be added to JetBlue’s website.

If you’re on the ground long enough to get your fix of public transportation, Google will offer you use of its Maps utility the option to view information about train (above and belowground) stations and lines, allowing individuals quick access and visual guidance about where they need to be and when they need to be there.

Google has featured some information about subway services in a number of cities around the world since Q1 of 2007, but only now is it adding information that commuters can really make use of. Most importantly, departure data.

As of this moment, Google is said to be doing “test runs of Boston, Chicago, London, Los Angeles, Montreal, New York, and San Francisco,” and while thoroughness varies by city, some metropolises in Europe (Zurich, for instance) are well documented already.

Note: Some in Google Labs have been working on a product dubbed Google Transit, which works as a trip-planning application focused on getting travelers around cities quickly and cheaply. Very few US cities are charted at present, though you’ll have a grand time making your way through Japan if you happen to live there or wish to visit. Nearly the whole of the country is online, so to speak.