Just had a debate with an industry friend and some colleagues around the office about this. Now, does it look cool? Absolutely, yes. Would I switch into 3D and have mess around from time to time? Sure. But will it really be that useful? I don’t think so and here’s why…

1. I’m not Superman, and won’t be scaling the walls of downtown office towers anytime soon, needing to correspond their heights while saving someone in distress.
2. Last time I checked, I’m also not a bird that needs to avoid flying into windows. I’m usually on the ground, looking straight ahead, or maybe a few stories up. It’s tough to see the top of the Sears Tower from the bottom.

What’s far more useful (but not as recent, as I’ve been informed) is matching up buildings that I see in front of me with Street View, or orienting myself using the compass. Don’t think me a Luddite here folks for bringing the 3D feature down a peg, I’m glad it’s there. But just not sure how much I’ll actually use it in the real world.

What’s really more day-to-day helpful out of the announcement today is that maps will now be rendered in vector, as opposed to image based. That’s why 3D is now possible – but what it also means is that when you zoom-in on the map it will load cleaner and all at once instead of in tiny little gray squares.

Now 3D television… that’s a different story!

Here’s the product demonstration video:

If Google first asked permission, nothing would actually get done. Just think of the simple process you run into where you send out a question to five people via email and you say, “Hey, could I get your response to this?” And then they don’t respond. So then you have to follow up again with them, this time pushing them, “Hey, I really need your response on this.” With all your pushing, you get four people to respond, but there’s always that one person that doesn’t respond and you have to call them. And when you finally get them on the phone you get some excuse, “I’m so sorry I didn’t respond to you, I’ve been really busy. Sure, I can give you a response.” And then in less than 15 seconds, he gives you the answer.

That’s just a story with five people. Imagine thousands or even millions. It’s simply not possible. So the answer Google goes with, “Let’s just do our next project, take the content we want, and let them complain about it afterwards” or more appropriately, “Let’s just do it, everyone will see the enormous value that they won’t care that we didn’t ask for permission first, and for those who do care, we can remove things after the fact.”

It’s a lot easier to operate like Google and like many other similar companies. Simply take the content without permission, and wait until you receive that cease and desist order. If you deal with the consequences after the fact, it’s an unknown quantity that may or may not be costly. The alternative method, ask permission first, is a well known and expensive option.

Is this the new model of publishing and content online? Just go ahead and do it and deal with the fallout afterwards? Look at Napster. That’s how they built their model. Sure it was a completely illegal platform, but they built a brand on it and people wanted that brand.

Google didn’t ask permission to search your site, but why would they?

Not many people realize this but Google Search operates under the same “do first, deal with consequences later” principle. Google indexes your site and the entire web and they do it all without first asking our permission. If you want, you can set up a robots.txt file to alert Google’s web spiders to pass over your site. Very few people know about this, nor do they employ it, because who wants to be invisible to Google? It would be like wanting to take your company’s name out of the phone book.

That’s kind of a dated analogy (“be like taking your name out of the phone book”) since almost nobody uses a phonebook anymore to find phone numbers. We all rely on Google. So go ahead phone company, take my name out of your book, but Google, please keep me in.