Last year saw YouTube integrated in to Google Earth, allowing surfers to watch videos tagged with the locations they are viewing on the Google application.
Now, YouTube has also been integrated in to Google Maps, and this has a much more commercial side to it, not on Google’s part, but for businesses in the US.
The feature was announced on the official Google Maps blog, and the example they used to showcase the new integration is a small bakery in San Francisco (as seen below).
Free Advertising
While that means nothing to me, sitting on the other side of the Atlantic, for the business concerned it means that they can now advertise their business on the Web for free simply by utilising YouTube and Google Maps.
As well as adverts, be they professionally made, or amateur efforts, businesses could also use the feature to offer virtual tours of their companies, or show off certain products.
Utilising Web Video
This feature, which at first glance may not seem very important, could help many small companies to build their business using the power of the Web.
No doubt it will also help cement Google and YouTube’s dominance of the Internet, but you can’t have everything.
