Anyway, I love google maps (and pretty much everything about google, if it was a man, I’d be smitten).

But it’s not perfect.

The “my maps” tool is really neat, but google has this way of creating really long, ugly urls (which is true with search result pages as well). This makes my job as website coordinator harder, because for some reason the software that we use for our websites does not like google’s urls. I made it work, but it was still annoying. The map is shiny though: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=103123629920963264624.0000011311ac08ae15919&z=15&om=1
(best viewed in hybrid mode, in my opinion)

Also, google’s software makes false assumptions about abbreviations. It thinks that “W” always means “West”, “E” means “East”, “I” means “Interstate”. As you know, DC’s streets are named for numbers, letters and states. You can imagine how the assumption that a letter always means a word is problematic for people who trust google not to lead them astray. I have emailed them about this problem, but I don’t think it’s been fixed yet.

It also frustrates me that the pages take forever to load, but that’s because we have a slow connection, and not google’s fault.