Among the plethora of Google's recent headlines, from its 'big brother' mobile phone tracking to its attempts to take on Apple in the mobile phone market, it stealthily launched an amazing new feature - the ability to time travel.
Its maps service, which lets you zoom in (in frightening detail) on almost anywhere in the world, now also allows you to go back in time, to view view all the maps google has of your area. In effect, you can see how your street has evolved.
The firm has initially made around 20 years of London’s history available, but has pledged to add more - in the US for instance, it has data going back hundreds of years.
But for London, and the UK as a whole, google faces a massive problem - copyright. There simply are not freely available maps of the UK (despite the best efforts of the excellent Free our Data campaign ).
The obvious source is the Ordanance Survey. However, they operate as a business, charging (a lot) for the data, something that has to change.
So while Google, and a host of other companies do their best to provide innovative, exciting uses for online maps, they are being crippled by a lack of government help in changing the rules.
And this is something that has to change for innovation in the UK online market to really explode, and help bring us out of the current economic crisis.
Startups such as Dopplr, which lets users track their travel plans along with their friends, show we have the know how and the talent - but now we need the data, and we need it to be freely available to everyone.

earth.google.com

Twitter, the online 'microblogging' service, has been going through something of a rough time lately.
Under fire from columnists (including several of my colleagues at the Standard) for being pointless, it has also had to deal with the arrival of celebrity madness since Jonathan Ross signed up, and persuaded many of his celebrity friends such as Russell Brand to join him.
For regular users of the service (myself included), this has proved something of a problem.
Rather like the point where your parents join Facebook, the arrival of the celebrity masses does seem a good time to bail out and find the next big thing. It's now impossible to log on without seeing messages from dozens of previously sensible and intersting contacts who are now convinced they are actually best friends with Stephen Fry or 'Wossy', as he is know online.
However, one thing this week has gone some way to redeeming twitter, and it was the snow.
As London descended into tube and travel chaos, Twitter was well ahead of the game, and more importantly providing an incredibly useful service to users.
One enterprising user set up a live online map tracking snowfall. By updating their account with their postcode and the amount of snow falling, users could contribute, and it gave an amazing indication of exactly what the weather was doing. By viewing the map, it was possible to see exactly where snow was falling at any time, and how heavily.
Most importantly, it proved that while a lot of twitter is about what C list celebs had for breakfast, it has also blossomed into a useful, simple communication tool which can be incredibly useful.
And while the general banal day to day chat may yet strangle the service before it has really become mass market, uksnow has shown that it's not a lost battle yet. And for the moment, I'm sticking with it to see what happens.