Google is raising the skirt / opening the kimono / lifting the basket — choose your metaphor — on their API. That means everyone can create things using Google’s tools; no more screen-scraping, grovelling through the code, or reverse engineering. As Al_x said, “the bleeding edge gets healing ointment.”

Now that they’ve opened up the code, making an annotated virtual map nows takes only 5 lines of code. Damn.

(See also http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2005/06/where_20_google.html)