Google Maps will soon embed on your site easily

Mashable is reporting Google Maps will soon be as easy to embed on your site as a YouTube video.

Over at downloadsquad.com, Brad Linder noted that Google will soon launch the new map embedding feature, along with a URL permalink. He added, citing ACPmag.com, that users will also have the option to copy-and-paste an embeddable line of code to add the map, as well.

As Linder pointed out in his article, yes, if you have a Google API key, know what you’re doing, you can embed Google Maps into blogs or Web pages now. For many people, though, using Google Maps in a variety of ways, past the typical screenshot of a location or a link to a specific point for a Google Map, is the extent of their knowledge.

When Google releases the new embeddable mapping feature, everything you’re used to using on the Google Map site right now, including the aerial display, the hybrid display, and the street view display, will be available for you to embed.

This means new users for the common user, such as dynamic mapping for news should be as easy as:

1. find the location
2. make a flag to identify it
3. copy-and-paste the code to embed the map

For some things, this is good news, but for other things, it can be bad. For instance, I went on a trip down memory lane not long ago using Google Maps. I checked out a few Army posts I was stationed at, as well as looked at aerial views of my childhood neighborhood. As bad as it looks driving through the area, it looks about 1,000 times worse from the air!