The new Google Places Search has its winners and losers. For one group though, it is turning out to be an incredible plus – those home based and service businesses that don’t want to show their address.

In March of this year when the feature was first released, the hide address/show service area feature hid more than your address. It hid your listing by burying it so deeply that it would take a back hoe to find it. It would only show for direct name searches and never return for a category search, even if well optimized.

Now if you choose to hide your address in your Google Places Dashboard you can still show front and center in the blended organo-local results. For example if you search for Baton Rouge Signs and look for for the company Greater Baton Rouge Signs, long missing from the Local results because of a hidden address, you will find them once again on the first page of the main page results:

Obviously, this result is subject to all of the caveats of the new blended Places Searches. The most obvious and critical requirement being the existence of a strong locally optimized website to compliment your Places listing. To some extent it demonstrates the relative weighting power of organic vs local strength in the new ranking algo as this listing was consistently on the third and fourth pages of Map results under the 7-Pack algo and now shows at A & B.

The Maps Data API is being deprecated and will no longer be available after January 31st 2011. For more information, including how to preserve your data and alternative solutions, read on…

When the Maps Data API was launched in Google Code Labs last year, it provided developers with a scalable distributed platform for hosting geospatial data. Since then we have received a lot of valuable feedback from developers, such as the need for visualisation of hosted data in Maps API applications, easy migration of existing spatial databases into the cloud, and a familiar data model and query syntax.

Earlier this year we launched a feature in the Google Maps API v3 that renders data stored in Fusion Tables, a Google Research project for storing large structured data sets in the cloud, which has an SQL based API, and recently gained support for spatial queries. The response both at developer events and online has been overwhelmingly positive. We have seen an explosion of compelling Maps applications that use Fusion Tables to store and visualise data.

Given this developer enthusiasm, and the fact that Fusion Tables addresses many of the features requested by developers for the Maps Data API, we have decided to recommend Fusion Tables as our cloud storage solution of choice for geospatial data going forward, and to deprecate the Maps Data API.

The Maps Data API will continue to be accessible until January 31st 2011, and Maps created using the Maps Data API will remain accessible in Google My Maps beyond this date. During the deprecation period we are also providing a Maps Data API data liberation tool. This tool offers download of Maps from the Maps Data API in KML format, or transfer to Fusion Tables, by the user that owns the data. Both data transfer and download to KML will preserve all data for the vast majority of maps. There are some rarely used features (e.g. certain custom properties) that are not represented in the KML download. See the FAQ in the tool for more details.

If you have any questions or concerns about the deprecation of the Maps Data API please consult the Maps Data API Forum. If you have been working with the Maps Data API we understand that this announcement may be disappointing. However we encourage you to take a look at Fusion Tables. We’re excited by the possibilities offered by its ease of use and powerful search and visualisation features, and we think you will be too.

Posted by Thor Mitchell, Maps API Product Manager

The “visualize your GPS track using Google Earth” field is becoming more crowded, but competition usually leads to better results, and Breadcrumbs seems to be a good example of that.

We’ve discussed a variety of similar sites in the past, such as @trip and Wikiloc, and Breadcrumbs is quite similar on the surface. However, their interface is top-notch, and they do some neat things with your data.

Here is a video that shows what it can do:

Here’s what they have to say about it:

Breadcrumbs is a cutting edge GPS track management application that allows users to visualize (in 3D), organize, edit and share their GPS data and associated photos/videos. Breadcrumbs takes your average desktop GPS management application to the web.

Our users can log their ski trip, hiking trip or sightseeing trip, upload it to Breadcrumbs with their photos and videos, and send it to all their friends, who can relive the adventure in 3D. And this is only the start, as we plan to provide our users with a platform to not only edit and maintain tracks, but also to find new places to explore and interact within a social network.

Why did we start Breadcrumbs?
When I first bought my Garmin Etrex and started tracking our snowboarding runs I was really disappointed with the software Garmin delivered. I ended up using Google Earth to visualize our tracks due to its realistic representations. I then wondered how to attach my photos and videos (I had a helmet camera)? The only solutions available were long-winded and technical. Another problem that I encountered was that there was no easy way to share my adventures with friends and family.

I partnered with my friend Christoph and we decided to take the problems into our own hands, and Breadcrumbs was born.

Who are we?
Christoph and I are two outdoor fanatics that moved from the UK and Austria, respectively, to Vancouver, where we met. As mentioned we devised Breadcrumbs after one of our many snowboarding trips. Using my consultancy experience in GIS and spatial development, and Christoph’s social web application background we started to work on Breadcrumbs in our free time, and that brought us to where we are today.

Features
Breadcrumbs is the first web application of its kind, where users can manage GPS tracks, photos and videos in one place – it can be thought of as ‘Flickr for GPS tracks’.

The key features of Breadcrumbs include:
Relive your adventure: Breadcrumbs brings together photos, videos and GPS tracks in one quick and easy process and our 3D playback function brings the track alive.
Edit and manage: Breadcrumbs comes with a suite of tools which let users edit and manage their GPS tracks, photos and videos. These include:
– Automated geotagging of photos.
– Track editing tool to correct GPS points.
– Add information to your adventure to help tell the story, such as show where you ate your lunch or spotted some wildlife.
– Organize: Breadcrumbs offers a rich set of tools to help users to manage adventures.
– Share: Breadcrumbs makes it easy to share adventures, with options including a public page for each track and direct integration with Facebook.

Finally we want to emphasize that we want to be an open platform and want to reach out to developers to integrate with Breadcrumbs through our API. We are already integrated with one smartphone application allowing the user to push their tracks directly to Breadcrumbs from their phone.

With all of the choices out there, you’ve got a lot to choose from. I typically use Garmin Connect, simply because data from my GPS watch (for running) is automatically uploaded there. However, I’ll be pushing some of the data over to Breadcrumbs now to see how well it works.

I asked the Breadcrumbs folks specifically about how their product compares to Garmin Connect, and here’s what they had to say:

Our main focus is allowing the user to relive their adventure not just through the GPS track as Garmin does, but also by combining photos and videos with the GPS track. We think there is a huge amount of value in placing those photos and videos on the map and Breadcrumbs’ automated geotagging process makes it easy for the user.

Our utilization and heavy integration with the Google Earth plugin is also a big bonus for the user. Garmin allows you to look at your data in Google Maps and indeed Google Earth. However, Breadcrumbs builds on this as we have built a track playback feature on top of the plugin which allows you to hit play and replay your trip step by step. It’s like watching a movie of your day out! This really does bring the users’ GPS data to life especially when sharing with friends and family.

We are an open platform. We have created an API so anyone can plug into Breadcrumbs and start pushing data to our application. We already have one smartphone developer on board, all he did was add a ‘Go Breadcrumbs’ button to his tracking application and using our API pushes the data to the users’ Breadcrumbs account. Garmin Connect is a closed platform, only providing smarthphone support through GPX.

To show you a bit more about how it works, they’ve created a tour to guide you through the software, which is a great way to get started with it.

With all of that being said, what GPS track software do you prefer?