Online maps are extremely popular and millions of people use them every day to either find local businesses, to obtain driving directions, to see high-definition aerial images of places or even to check real-time traffic information.

Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL compete with each other to improve their online mapping services, which have become an important part of local search websites.

Google is the unbeaten leader in web computing software delivered over the internet and literally runs inside a browser. However, many browser applications cannot do all those things that the powerful PC-based software can. Google has been trying to close that gap and finally achieved the fruits of its efforts.

Google said that third party developers can now use the programming interfaces to Google Earth, which is their 3-D visualization software. This will enable developers to embed Google Earth on websites.

Google Maps is currently being used by thousands of websites that have created applications, to be able to do various things like pointing the place where a crime has taken place or showing the various apartment rentals in various cities and even showing the path of airplanes in flight. These sites will now be able to improve on those applications with better visualization software from Google Earth. Developers will also be able to make use of Google Earth’s 3-D imaging, to create new applications to run on their sites. These applications will be embedded in the websites and will be accessible through a browser, and they will work even if users have not installed Google Earth on their computers.

However, users who want the full spectrum of features and data that is available on Google Earth, will still have to download the software onto their computers.

Google also says that it is possible to overlay content over the stars, planets and galaxies by using the Sky mode toggle, which lets people build 3-D Google Sky mashups. Google 3-D buildings can also be created with just one line of JavaScript as well as get KML data from the web, which is the file format that is used to display geographic data in a browser.

Currently, this plug-in only works with Windows Vista or XP; however, support for the other operating systems is being planned for the future.

According to Google, they introduced a set of software tools called Gears, a year ago, which help developers in building browser applications, which run like PC-based software. These tools were used by MySpace for revamping its mail service. This provides MySpace users the ability to easily sort and search all their mail messages, without having to click on each and every page to find what they are looking for.

The use of Gears by MySpace is the largest ever attempt to use these tools and it is most successful. Google believes that this will encourage other companies to use Gears to either improve their web applications or even create new applications.

Even Google is planning to use the software tools to make Gmail available to users even when they are not connected to the internet. Google is not giving this project a deadline; however, they do hope that it happens this year.

With Google taking giant strides in the web applications department, the future certainly holds many more exciting improvements for webmasters.