Couple of weeks ago I had chance to experience a GPS enabled (AT&T) blackberry 8310 in Islamabad. The good thing was that we were able to view our real time location on handset screen with Google maps. I was greatly impressed as the accuracy was more than anything, with spotting us exactly as where our car was. It was awesome.

I am quite familiar with Islamabad/Rawalpindi, however, while on the road we had to go to Barakahu (a town 10 KM north to Islamabad). GPS handset was doing well by displaying all satellite images, and our real time location, but the unfortunate thing was that the map didn’t show names of locations, streets and other information; leaving us almost helpless.

However, there is a good news, as through Muhammed Nasrullah on TGP we have heard that Google is now allowing everyone to add/append locations on Google Map. Mr. Nasrullah quoting a GIKI graduate, currently working in Google, has revealed that anyone who has Google Account can add roads, landmarks, coffee shops, hospitals, parks, gas stations etc. on the map and moderate entries made by other people.

To start your work, just log-in with your account and point your address bar to following URL

http://www.google.com/mapmaker

To Edit/Add Islamabad locations:    Click here
To Edit/Add Lahore locations:    Click here

For more details visit: http://www.google.com/mapmaker/mapfiles/s/support.html

So things are going to get easy in coming days, when some of service provider is going to locate nearest gas station from our current location, also it may suggest us the cheapest gas station and so on…
But we will have to be act wisely, and prevent any spam