Google Maps for the Philippines!

For the longest time the Philippines had been inadequately charted in Google maps. For instance, in Manial, only the major thoroughfares, like EDSA, had been identified - and even these had the major shortcoming of being wildly imprecise, vis-a-vis the satellite image of the actual terrain.

That was then, this is now:

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Wow, how cool is that! I haven't been this excited about and impressed with Google Maps/Earth since the time when the 3-D terrain feature and 3-D buildings feature were first rolled out. This is huge - HUGE! - for us Google Maps-loving Pinoys.

What's even more amazing about this new feature is the process in which it came about. This was the result of crowd-sourcing, where tens of thousands of volunteer Pinoys took it upon themselves to map out their localities. Wow. The economics of crowd-sourcing is simply unbelievable. This was something that, if left in the hands of just a single corporation - or even a conglomeration of several corporations - would have taken years to pull off, not to mention a lot of money to pay for the manpower needed. (To put in in perspective, it has only been a mere five months since Google Map Maker - the app that allowed the charting of user-defined maps - was launched.)

Is there still room for improvement? Definitely. Some areas still suffer from imprecise mapping, for instance in Cebu. Given what Pinoys have been able to do in 5 months, I'm sure this is something that can easily be fixed.

Great job to everybody who contributed! Maraming salamat sa inyo mga kababayan!