A few days after the great nation of Blogovania exploded over the introduction of Google Maps, comes this great hack: Map Address Book addresses via Google Maps (via Mac OS X Hints). For Mac OS X lovers only, of course (even though Google Maps doesn’t work with Safari. Yet.). Now just hook this up to a PodQuest-like feature, and you’d really be all set—especially since Maps automatically gives you directions on how to get back home, a feature MapQuest has inexplicably never added.
The other item worth an editorial mention is not Google’s continuing roll-out of great browser-based applications, but that Google Maps uses XSLT for styling search results (as pointed out in the in-depth article at as simple as possible, but no simpler [favorite quote: “but personally I didn’t even know XSLTProcessor existed!”]).
First it was XMLHttpRequest for Gmail, now XSLTProcessor for Maps. 2005 may be a nice year for lovers of XML after all.