Users of Google Earth have been allowed to geo-tag videos since October 2007 and view the results on the service’s YouTube layer. Some searching today will show quite a lot of clips already tacked onto the virtual globe since the option became available. Well, Google is now building on its YouTube embed features even further. Starting this week, the company is including the option of users to affix video clips to specific locations on its more basic, more widely-utilized Google Maps service.
If you’re a business owner, you’ll likely appreciate this development. If you’re just an individual with a video camera, you might also find this appealing, since you can share clips with friends, family, and tons of strangers while offering some geographic bearing for your handheld productions. Sure, Google Earth users probably get a bit more out of the experience through the YouTube layer launched several months ago, but Google Maps embeds can certainly prove useful in numerous scenarios as well.
The prime example Google offers in its introduction of YouTube attachments to Google Maps locations is of course related to commerce - pastries, no less - since the service is clearly most often used to find destinations, many of which I would presume to be places of business. If you’re in the field of sales, say, and you’re looking to market yourself in a more interactive fashion, a simple production uploaded to YouTube and linked with your profile on Google Maps could go some way to gaining more interest and traffic. Or, if you’re in the business of real estate, perhaps marketing rental properties, and are often placing listings on Craigslist fitted with Google Maps links, you can offer easily-accessible visual tours of apartments and so forth in addition to still photographs.