Wouldn’t it be nice if Google added an extra dimension to Google Maps? One that would allow us to “go back in time” and see the previous versions of the maps?
Here is what I have in mind. Say, I want to see how a forest, a city, a glacier, the south pole or my neighborhood has changed over time. I navigate to the map I’m interested in and then, I go back and forth in time (actually, older versions of the same map) by sliding the “time control” much like I would zoom in or out.
I you like the idea, spread it out!
The ‘Map Archive’ idea is pretty interested indeed, especially if there exist old enough snapshots of the maps, where significant changes in the landscape exist.
Time is in general a depreciated dimension in the web, in the sense that, if you forget archive.org, you have learned not to care about how a web page looked a couple of months ago, etc. And, yes, maps is one of the first categories this may really matter, let me think of the other ones..
Maybe people who have historical photos of a location could upload them somehow. It would be very cool to not only see a place as it exists now but go “back in time” to what it looked like years (or decades) earlier. I hope Google (or somebody else) implements this idea.