It really is something. If you've never seen it, switch to satellite and start scrolling out. That's realtime cloud information that appears and as you keep going you get realtime night/day location rendering (complete with artificial lighting) and then realtime locations for all the major bodies in our solar system (which you can then hop over too and take a look at) (Edit: Ok, maybe this isn't locations of the bodies but you can still hop over to them and look around. The earth/sun location seems right though). Everyone I show this to has never seen it but the Google engineers that work on this stuff clearly care about what they are putting out.

I remember when Google maps first came out in like 2005 or so. It was a truely revolutionary app.

Not just for being one of the first apps to be properly dynamic and AJAX based, but also because it was possibly the first time that we had access to an entire world of satellite maps online, something previously reserved for large corporations and governments.

I wouldn't even know my own neighbourhood as well as I do without Google maps. One of, if not the single most impressive digital feats freely available to all on the internet.

Can't live without it. I travel a lot.

Lately I have even been wanting an operating system that has maps as the main UI, or a majorly core feature. With the amount that I use maps, it is an absolute pain to have to switch to it all the time.

I pin every place recommendation I find in my social circles online and tag them with who suggested them. When I'm driving I'd like to pin/note places I see without interacting with the phone. When I'm flying I wan't to know what specific features I am seeing from the air (towns, mountains, lakes). When I'm on a road trip I want to hear snippets of info about the small towns that I'm passing through or the things I see out the window. When I'm walking I want to use the camera for input and output to the map to pin and locate myself. When I'm indoors I don't want to feel lost again or ask where the restroom is.

Location has become a core part of my interaction with the world but it still feels rather basic as a 3rd party app on my phone. Or another tab on my desktop.

Can maps be a killer app?

Well said. It kills an old Core2 laptop I have. Literally crashes Linux.

My fault of course for using that laptop, but sometimes I forget because it basically works for most other things.