At the Where 2.0 show Google’s John Hanke in his keynote discussed Google Maps’ evolution from a yellow pages like database of service business listings, plotted on a map, to something much broader. Indeed, Google seems to be rapidly building out Maps will all kinds of additional information. And the community/My Maps feature is a key element of all of it.
The company is also experimenting with how best to surface this information:
Recently it added images from Panaramio (theoretically Flickr should show up too at some point). In addition, there are some other features I just noticed last night:
Screenwerk 