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In the escalating war over the planet Earth between Google and Microsoft, Google has opened up Google Earth for development.

Today at the Google I/O developers conference, Google launched the Google Earth API and browser plug-in. The Google Earth API enables web developers to Web pages into 3D map apps.

Google points to the rise of the Geoweb, a collection of user-generated content (UGCe.g. photos, videos) associated with a location.

The Google Maps API, with over 150,000 developer sites, and the Google Earth client, with over 400 million downloads, promise to help users visualize this Geoweb of content.

Key features from the Google Earth team:

• Embed Google Earth inside any web page with only a few lines of code.

• Use the JavaScript API to enable rich Earth-based web applications.

• Manipulate KML and the 3D environment: create polygons, lines, placemarks, and more.

• Convert your existing Google Maps API site to 3D with as little as one line of code.

• View the thousands of existing 3D buildings, or add your own 3D models.

• Switch to Google Sky mode for high-res imagery of stars, planets, and galaxies.

Google has yet to launch a desktop telescope to keep pace with Microsoft but opening up the API should yield some innovative applications.

Google announced new improvements to the “integrated Google experience” on iPhone. Call the GOOGiPhone upgrade what you like. It’s still all about search.
iPhone Google 1.0 UI — only 30 something days old — combined Google web applications (Google Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader for RSS feeds) in a single interface.
Now Google has streamlined the [...]

We really do love your software. And we appreciate the fact that you introduce valuable new features so frequently. But please: slow down a little, and spend a bit more time on bug testing.
In the time-honored model of software development (call it “pre-Web 1.0″), teams of programmers worked for years to craft scores of subroutines, [...]

Want a snapshot of the day’s search marketing news? Here we’ve collected today’s top news stories posted to the Search Engine Watch Blog, along with search-related headlines from around the Web:
From the SEW Blog:

Justifying the Investment in Industry ConferencesGoing to industry conferences is expensive, no doubt. But it would cost you more in the end [...]

Michael Arrington at Techcrunch reported that Yahoo is announcing fireeagle, which is a new service for obtaining geo-location information, storing it, and making it available to other web applications. This is a technology coming out of Yahoo Brickhouse, a semi-autonomous Yahoo group focused on new product development.
Evidently, the whole system is permission based, which [...]

Shortly after losing out to Microsoft in its efforts to woo social network du jour Facebook, Google has unveiled OpenSocial, a set of common APIs to be backed by Google and an alliance of social sites including LinkedIn, Friendster, Plaxo and Ning.
The strategy is meant to attract developers to an open platform, as Facebook [...]

A new project from the Mozilla Foundation, called Prism, lets people split web applications out of the browser and run them on the desktop.Prism is Windows only right now, but Mac and Linux versions have been promised and are in the works.
“Prism isn’t a new platform, it’s simply the web platform integrated into the desktop [...]

The updated Google Docs & Spreadsheets offers folders for organizing documents, along with a few new enhancements.Google’s love of labels as organization method, especially in Gmail, tends to be a little jarring to people who have become used to folders. Those users will find something of a comfort zone in Google Docs and its newest [...]

Apple’s iPhone is going 2.0 before 1.0 is even released. The company announced that when the much-anticipated phone ships at the end of this month, it will run third-party applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards. That leaves an open field for aspiring developers as long they create applications that can integrate seamlessly with iPhone [...]

Google announced an open source browser extension that enables web applications to run offline.Google wrapped up its Developer Day in Sydney, Australia, with a handful of announcements. One of them will help make its many applications available to people who are temporarily without a web connection, like business travelers.
“Unfortunately, today’s web browsers lack some fundamental [...]