Google Earth, previously confined to your PC based client, will now be available on the web and for developers to mash up as they wish. In fact, any of the over 150,000 sites that have already integrated Google Maps into their sites will be able to include Google Earth with just a single line of code. This will put it in direct competition with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth, which is already a browser-based application.

Google announced this today at their annual conference for software developers in San Francisco.

While the Google Earth images accessed through a web browser won’t be as powerful as those through the client software, users will not need the client to access it. Google is submitting this innovation as further evidence that web based applications are quickly become as powerful as those on your PC.

Mac users such as myself are left out of the loop for now as the Google Earth plugin is only available for Windows right now. However, Mac support is coming soon, and when developers are forced to choose between Google Earth and Virtual Earth, which doesn’t plan on implementing Mac support, the edge may go to Google.

Is there a future where Google Maps and Google Earth merge into one entity? The ease with which Google is integrating Earth with Maps suggests that is the case.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 at 12:15 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.