USA: Google deeply believes in the value of being open, so it has decided to expand the reach of Google Earth by bringing it to the browser. Google I/O has unveiled the Google Earth API and browser plug-in.

As the latest member of Google's Maps API family, the Google Earth API allows Web developers to quickly and easily turn their Web pages into 3D map applications. They can now use the Earth as their canvas and apply their creative vision to a geographically rich, 3D environment, leveraging the same technologies we use in the desktop Google Earth client. For consumers this means that they will soon see Google Earth in many more places around the Web -- perhaps even their favorite Web site.

More and more users are interested in seeing the world's information in a geographic context, which has lead to the rise of the Geoweb, a collection of user-generated content (e.g. photos, videos and so on) associated with a given location. Its not just about sharing pictures of a family vacation anymore. Now people can visually convey the miles logged while traveling to Patagonia or the Seychelles Islands, for example.

The Google Maps API, with over 150,000 developer sites, and the Google Earth client, with over 400 million downloads, are both tremendously successful tools to help users visualize this Geoweb of content. Now that Google has brought the Google Earth API to the developer community, you can only imagine what wonderfully creative new web applications will be developed.

Key features of Google Earth:

* Embed Google Earth inside any web page with only a few lines of code.
* Use the JavaScript API to enable rich Earth-based web applications.
* Manipulate KML and the 3D environment: create polygons, lines, placemarks, and more.
* Convert your existing Google Maps API site to 3D with as little as one line of code.
* View the thousands of existing 3D buildings, or add your own 3D models.
* Switch to Google Sky mode for high-res imagery of stars, planets, and galaxies.

Supported browsers currently include Firefox 2.x, IE6, and IE7, all on Windows.