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