Google Earth Hacks blog

As I revealed on the Digital Earth Blog last night, EarthSwoop has launched.  What is it?  EarthSwoop is a tool you can use to easily create collections of locations around the globe.  Some examples:

• Some venues for the 2008 Beijing Olympics
• All 32 NFL stadiums
• The 50 US State Capitol buildings
• The 7 Wonders of the Modern World

It’s very easy to create a collection, and the result is a nice interface with lots of tools to enhance your data.  Here is a short video that shows you how to create a collection, or you can get a little more info over on the Digital Earth Blog.

Here is an example of an embedded collection, the 30 Major League Baseball stadiums:

Powered by EarthSwoop | More info about this collection

As reported by the Digital Earth Blog and Google Earth Blog, the Google Earth plug-in now works in Firefox 3!  This was a silent update, as you don’t even need to update your plug-in — it simply works.  Presumably some code on the backend has been updated.

Updating browser plug-ins can be a pain, and I was worried that we’d be seeing a lot of them from Google as they get the plug-in fixed up.  However, this will be quite nice if they can do most of the updating remotely and not require users to update the plugin themselves.

It’s still a Windows-only program, but they’re making progress.  Now you Firefox 3 users can play with ShareIt, or embed our other files, or play games such as Monster Milktruck.

We’ve already showed you how you can embed any of our files and collections on your own site, but what if you just want to show someone your house, school, or some other location in Google Earth?

Up until now, you had to:

• Open up Google Earth
• Find your location
• Create a placemark
• Title the placemark
• Save the placemark to your PC
• E-mail to a friend

While those steps are worthwhile if you have a complex creation to share, they’re kind of overwhelming for just sharing a single location.  Welcome, ShareIt!

Using the Google Earth plug-in, ShareIt makes it very simple to share locations with your friends, and/or embed them on your own site.

• Give your location a title
• Find it in Google Earth (using the plug-in)
• Submit!

The script will automatically create a new page for the item, a KML for Google Earth, and embed code for your own site, so you can do whatever you want with it.  You don’t even need to log-in to create an item — just do it!

I’m going to the Georgia Aquarium tomorrow, so here’s a quick look at that amazing building:

Try it out for yourself and let us know what you think.

Note: The plug-in doesn’t current work with Firefox 3, but according to the comments on this post at Google Earth Blog, we should see an update for it any day now.

We’ve just added support for the Google Earth plug-in to another area of our site — the collections.

Now, when viewing a collection you will see a link that says “View this entire collection using the Google Earth plug-in”.  This will bring up a page with the plug-in on the left and the collected files on the right.  Click a thumbnail to fire it in the main window.  It makes browsing collections much easier!  Here is an example using the NASCAR collection.

But we’ve taken it a step further.  If you see a collection that you like, you can grab the embed code and embed it on your site!  The script will build a smaller, more lightweight version of the collection designed to run on your site.  Here is the NASCAR collection using the embed code:

Since we’ve already built support for you to view our entire collection of 20,000+ placemarks using the plug-in, it only makes sense that we give you the power to embed those, too.  If you view ANY of our files on their Google Earth Plug-in page (like this page for the Hoover Dam), there is some embed code on there now, too!  Here is the Hoover dam using the embed code:

If you have any questions or problems, please let us know.

Google has just released a TON of new imagery for StreetView — 37 new areas, 10 new parks and recreation areas, and expanded coverage in 15 cities.  It’s quite staggering.

If you find something cool in all of that new imagery, don’t forget to submit it to our ever-growing StreetView gallery.

More information about this release can be found on the Digital Earth Blog or the Google LatLong Blog.

Earlier today, Google released a plug-in that allows you to view Google Earth content right in your browser!  It’s quite slick, though it has a few drawbacks — Windows-only, and no support for Firefox 3 yet.  Still, it’s pretty neat.  More info about the plug-in can be found on the LatLong Blog, Ogle Earth, GEB or DEB.

I’ve spent most of the day writing code to support it on our site.  I’m pleased to say that’s done!  For some reason, the plug-in won’t handle about 10% of our files, but I’m working on those.  To go along with that, I’ve made it easier for you to view our content in different applications (including the plug-in).

Look at the right side of this screenshot.  You’ll notice five icons next to each item.  Those allow you to view each item in Google Earth, Google Maps, Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps, or the Google Earth Plug-in.  The first four options have been available for a while, but you used to have to drill down to the file detail page to get to it.  Now it’s much easier to view the content across a variety of services.

If you have any questions or suggestions on how we can streamline further, please let me know.  Thanks!

To go along with all of the new features from a few weeks ago, we’ve just added an arcade to the forums.

I’ve installed a handful of fun games, so check them out and see if you can top the leaderboard.

If you have any game suggestions or problems, please use our Site Issues and Questions forum.  Have fun!

We’ve just upgraded our forums to vBulletin 3.7.0, which adds a ton of new features!  Some in particular:

• Some social networking kinds of features, such as friends and groups.
• You can create photo galleries, either for yourself or as part of a group.
• Your profile pages are much better looking and more informative.  Here is SpiderX22’s profile for an example.  In addition to the new vBulletin features and layout, your profile page also shows how many files you’ve uploaded, how many StreetView locations you’ve added, and your current progress in GEMMO.  You can also leave messages for users directly on their profile page.

There are a ton of other small bug fixes and enhancements, but those are the major changes.  If you have any problems, please let me know.  Have fun!

With the release of the StreetView API a few weeks ago, followed by the addition of StreetView to Google Earth a few days ago, I figured it was time for us to open up a section on the site that was dedicated to showcasing fun StreetView content.

Voila! - www.gearthhacks.com/streetview

I’ve tried to make it as easy to use as possible.  If you are looking at a cool StreetView location in Google Maps, just grab the URL from inside of the “Link to this page” link and add it to our site.  The server takes it from there.

Your submissions will show up immediately.  You can vote on existing submissions (a single up/down vote) to help sort out the good from the bad.

I had hoped to be able to dynamically generate KML files for each submission that would fly you into the same view in StreetView in Google Earth, but that doesn’t appear to be possible.  I’ve done the next best thing, which is to dynamically generate a KML for each StreetView location which will fly you to that place in Google Earth — it’s up to you to enter the StreetView bubble and look around.

Play with it, add stuff, break it, etc.  It may be a bit buggy, so please let me know if you see any weirdness.  I wasn’t sure what categories to start with, so please suggest some more categories here.

Have fun!

As you certainly know by now, Google Earth version 4.3 has been released.  It has a bunch of great new features and already has generated a lot of reviews, screenshots and videos.  Here are some of the best we’ve seen so far:

Download it! — First up, you need to download this latest version.  Get it straight from Google, or use our download page.

Google LatLong: Introducing Google Earth 4.3 — The official announcement from Google, with a list of new features.

Google Earth Blog: Video Demo of Google Earth 4.3 — A great tour of the new features, created by Frank Taylor.

Google Earth Tour — Another video tour, this time directly from Google.

Digital Earth Blog: Google Earth 4.3 thoughts, screenshots and a video — A brief review of the new features found in 4.3

Mashable: Google Earth 4.3 Released — An overview from Mashable.

Google Earth Blog: New Navigation Gadgets in Google Earth 4.3 — A video from Google about the new nav gadgets, along with a list of keyboard and mouse shortcuts.

Digital Earth Blog: Google Earth vs. Virtual Earth in Denver — A quick look at how the two products match up visually.

That should give you all the information you need for Google Earth 4.3.  If you know of any unique item that I’ve missed, feel free to tell us in the comments.  Have fun!