Genius idea! Instead of sending out your snail mail in a boring old white envelope, print out the Google Map onto the envelope showing where it’s coming from and going to. So maybe it’s just a concept from Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University, but it’s genius. Their concept is to actually let you send snail mail via an extra button from within the Gmail interface itself. This is the best idea since the Google results page business cards.
Astute users of Google Maps will note that there is one CRUCIAL flaw with this design. That is the “from” address always has to be located West of the “to” address. In other words, you can only send Google Maps Envelopes to someone who lives East of your address. But otherwise this is a pretty awesome idea. And yes I could totally see this listed as one of Google’s infamous April Fools pranks.
via yanko
So Google Maps needs to add a rotation feature in order to make this work.
No, the FROM address does NOT need to be West of the TO address. Just rotate the map until the addresses are in the correct alignment. North does not always have to be at the top.
About rotation feature, check “Labs” in google maps because this function already exists !!!
Perfect for those of us that live on the West coast! I can’t think of anyone that lives between me and the beach.
I’d say everybody lives east of me … depends on how far you want to travel. I love spherical objects 😀
Hahaha, amazing idea but totally useless for me. I live on the east coast of Florida.
people, kaonashi has it right. they can be in any relative location, just rotate the map. its weird how people feel that north is up.
one way to combat the “flaw”:
use google earth instead, since you can rotate the map to what you need
There’s actually a current Google Maps mashup that lets you print an envelope with a map on the inside! 🙂
Map Envelope
You do realize that the earth doesn’t just stop at the easternmost point on the map, right? Every point on Earth is technically West of every other given point, and something like this would obviously incorporate that fact.