Wow! so much to post about all of a sudden. Google have just announced an update to their streetmap data, adding new streets in the rapidly expanding areas of our cities. Yay! I mean it is exciting, in fact, I think it’s the first update to the map data since they released it! Well, at least you can no longer say that Open Street Map is more up to date than Google, now that they’ve got all that shiny new data – lets go and have a look!
We can use the wonderful MapCompare to see how the new Google Data compares to Open Street Map in some of the new, outlying suburbs, like: Caroline Springs, oh darn that’s not such a good example – how about Sydenham – that’s better, I’m sure Google will add the cycle paths soon. Let’s try Lalor, oops! What about we try somewhere out east? like Pakenham.
Oh damn it!
Seriously though, I did have to carefully select locations where OSM was clearly better than the new improved Google Maps. They’ve done a great job updating it. Just goes to show though, that a huge company like Google takes years to get around to posting data that in many ways is not as detailed as that sourced from volunteers and offered up for free reuse. I think I’ll go and stick all those shiny new OSM streets on my Garmin GPS – because I definitely can’t do that with Google’s!