The Globe Glider Story

It all started in 2005. I took a trip to Japan, and Google Earth was launched.

Like most tourists, I came home with a lot of pictures. I decided to make your standard old travelogue, something for which I required maps. I consulted Google Earth, and found, to my shock and horror, that GE, in those long-gone days, lacked something very important: maps of Japan’s cities and the roads within them.

Much to my amazement, I discovered that Google Maps provided excellent coverage of all and any community in Japan—right down to the smallest of hamlets.

That gave me an idea for an experiment - putting Google Maps graphics into Google Earth. This experiment produced a script overlaying Google Maps on Google Earth. Thanks to word of mouth, this script became a service still being used by hundreds of people every day.

Globe Glider the first

This success emboldened me to launch a product offering the best of both worlds: Google Earth's awesome and captivating aerial views and Google Maps' extent and depth of practical, orientation-enhancing detail. To further strengthen this orientation, I added an HTML window showing information on the current view and offering clickable links for nearby places of interest.

With its databases of location-related content from sources like Wikipedia or Flickr the Globe Glider service thus became a "geo-browser", a tool for viewing information in a geographical context.

Today's Globe Glider

The times were very exciting in 2006. Inspired by its runaway success, Google kept on releasing new and better versions of Google Earth, each with greater capabilities: networking, 3D models. Then came the Mac and Linux versions and I soon realized that Globe Glider, which was then tied to the Windows platform, needed a major redesign.

Meanwhile, mighty Microsoft entered the game. Their answer to Google Maps: Virtual Earth. In addition to aerial pictures and maps, VE features an exciting new feature: 45° views of cities.

Why not integrate these 'bird's eye' views into Globe Glider and synchronize them with Google Earth?

That was the suggestion given to us by Frank Taylor, of Gearthblog fame. It led me to integrating Microsoft Maps, and that, in turn, led to a change in the basic concept. No more just a Google Earth add-in. Instead: a true geo-browser, combining the leading geographic information sources.

So here's the new version of Globe Glider. As for the travelogue of my trip to Japan - that will still take some time...